


There Ain’t No Leaving Me Behind

by chapstickaddict



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Everyone else is confused on how this happened, Falling in love with the little things, Genji Shimada is and isn’t a Little Shit, Hanzo and Jesse get one another, M/M, Possible canon errors, Switching, allusions to past noncon, confident!Jesse, prideful!Hanzo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-30
Updated: 2019-08-14
Packaged: 2020-07-20 15:29:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 36,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19994506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chapstickaddict/pseuds/chapstickaddict
Summary: It started when the bounty on one Shimada Hanzo, kin-killer and clan-deserter, was removed from circulation.That’s a lie. It started long before that, but that was when Hanzo and Jesse decided to make it official. In truth, it started in increments; much like a rock slide, the only warning came from stones, unheeded as they tumbled down one by one.Shimada Hanzo and the outlaw known as Jesse Mcree have pasts made up of aches and pains and contradictions. They survive.





	1. sitting in a old monte carlo, a man whose heart is hollow

**Author's Note:**

> My grandmother died last week, and it brought a lot of family issues through the floodgates. It sucked. I wrote this while I was on planes/train/automobiles, dealing with family. I don’t play Overwatch, but I was reading McHanzo fic recently. So my emotions turned to them. I am unfamiliar with the finer points of canon that come from playing the game. There will likely be continuity errors, if you are a stickler. 
> 
> Title is from Rhianna’s Desperado
> 
> Trigger warning: Jesse’s sexual history while part of the Deadlock gang carries violence. It comes up in a conversation between he and Hanzo about needs, and it reads as noncon. It’s not detailed, or lingered on. It’s not the point of this story. Please, look out for yourself.
> 
> Lastly I wrote this entirely on my phone. I’m sure there are spelling/grammar errors—I tried to catch what I could.

Hanzo would deny that he harbored a romantic streak. Such flights of fantasy were reserved for star-crossed lovers and younger siblings. With that possibility dismissed, he had no term for the thin stretch of idealism in his soul that existed beside the blood, fear, and pain that was his duty and his guilt. A single thread amongst a massive tapestry that constituted his life. 

It wasn’t his fault it had woven that way. His earliest memory was to blame. He couldn’t be held responsible for what his young brain decided to lodge into his long-term memory. 

It had been at the cherry-blossom festival, or sometime thereabout. He wasn’t sure of the exact date because that hadn’t mattered. 

His mother, heavily pregnant with Genji and slow to move, descended the stone stairs to their local temple. She had dressed in her most complex and bedecked kimono, and picked her steps with care, graceful and precise in her every action. Her hair was an intricate, sweeping updo woven into a golden headdress styled to resemble the sun. Her face was serene and untroubled, for all her treacherous footing and perilous circumstances. The picture of effortless wonder and the height of sophistication, to Hanzo’s young eyes. 

His father, dressed traditionally in a dark blue patterned kimono and black hakama, was an elegant figure braced a few steps below her. He held his hand for his mother to rest her own over, guiding and supporting her down steps worn by time that offered no handholds. The cherry blossoms shook around them, framing the memory with their scent and motion and sealing the tableau into Hanzo’s memory like a well-etched woodcarving. 

It didn’t matter that his parents had not spoken to each other much in those months, angry at one another over things Hanzo couldn’t comprehend. It didn’t matter that the familial ceremony and the reception afterward were a torturous affair of passive-aggressive comments and backstabbing. It didn’t matter that clan politics infiltrated even this. It did not matter that his uncle had gotten too drunk on sake and had been put down hard by his father. That his mother had spent most of the evening uncomfortable and miserable. That Hanzo, still so alone without Genji, had been left to fend for himself amongst a sea of vicious adults.

What stuck in his memory was the single image of a beautiful figure descending, the surety of her journey dependent on a steady hand offered by one who cared, and the guiding, protective support it represented.

“Damn,” Mcree muttered nearly thirty-five years later. He stumbled over the last few steps in the grimy ally-cum-basement stairway, the ancient wood rotting and falling apart. He leapt the last few feet to the ground as they crumbled under his boots. 

Hanzo didn’t think well of old European cities. They boasted no thought to city-planning or longevity. Maintenance was an oft-ignored afterthought. The rundown back-end of London they stood ankles deep in was just the latest in a long line of examples he had seen during his journeys. 

He paused still behind McCree, waiting to see if the rest of the rickety staircase would give way. He could jump it safely if needed, though the wounds he picked up over the last two hours of fighting of Talon agents made the prospect abhorrent. There was no handrail—the ramshackle steps didn’t call for one. He braced himself against the stone that rose up against his right side, the rough edges digging into his palm. If he tried to grip it without gloves, he would lose fingernails and tear skin. 

He vindictively hoped that the wounded Talon agent he and McCree tracked was having as hellish of a time as they were. Winston, monitoring from the satellites above, was confident their prey had fallen down this particular gutter-ally. Bleeding profusely from an arrow in the shoulder and a bullet in the gut, they could not have gotten far. 

He wasn’t so sure as Winston and McCree. His hunter’s instinct screeched for him to get higher, not lower. He silenced that instinct as he was an uninitiated member of the new and improved Overwatch, and he was weary of his footing to have such opinions. To question given orders.

“Watch yourself, darlin’,” Mcree said, holding his hand back to Hanzo. His feet were planted firmly on the ground at the end of the staircase remains. “Whole thing outta be condemned, the shape it’s in.”

Hanzo froze. His scarf had been lost in the chaos of battle hours earlier—his hair fell around his shoulders and framed his face with feathery brushes. His clothes were a disheveled, dirty mess after his roll through a muddy sinkhole. He was nearly out of arrows. Storm Bow was slung over his shoulder in a universal sign of soldierly world-weariness, and the string constantly captured strands of his loose hair. A mild irritation on top of a hundred other aches and pains he sported. 

McCree, comprised of well-worn leather and threadbare flannel, bloodied from the fight, and covered in a fine layer of dirt and muck from brim to boot, did not cut an elegant figure. He had dark circles under his eyes and was favoring his right side after he took the brunt of a blow during the fighting. He had not shaved in a month, and the hair that escaped his hat was an untamed mess. He wasn’t looking at Hanzo, instead eying the space around them, alert for an unexpected attack. 

It was nothing like the picture in Hanzo’s memory. It was messy and grimy, caked in layers of annoyance and painful physical demands of his body. He was in the midst of battling a decade-long bout of depression that screamed for him to find a bottle of sake to dull the chronic, heart-stopping, breath-catching guilt and sorrow he suffered whenever Genji so much as crossed his mind. The mix was spiced with a healthy dose of anxiety and paranoia at the feeling of Overwatch’s eyes on him.

That didn’t stop the little vein of idealism from sparking, nestled deep enough in the fabric of his being to escape the ugly truths of his life. He was swamped with the same notions of warmth, of adoration, of desirability. Grace converged around him, igniting a memory long ignored, and abruptly, painfully relevant. 

Just as McCree glanced back to see what the matter was, Hanzo took his support away from the rough-hewn wall. He laid his hand over the cowboy’s gloved knuckles, and let them support his descent. 

“Thank you,” he muttered as McCree helped him to the ground. 

“No problem, sugar. Hate to see you take a tumble.” 

The dank, grimy ally was not Hanamura in full bloom. Hanzo was not his parents. There was nothing elegant or beautiful about the stains and smells around them. Hanzo needed no help to walk on his own. Jesse McCree guiding him down a set of rotting stairs was not the perfect recreation of a cherished memory. 

It was the sincere replication of adoration and care the memory invoked. It was Jesse McCree, who eyed him up not with suspicion or lust a month ago, but with curiosity, thoughtlessly and easily tripping into Hanzo’s most desired memory. 

And that’s what did it for Hanzo. 

***

Jesse’s favorite music was a refined taste. While a member of Deadlock, these songs had permeated every truck, bar, and bedroom he occupied. Not a quirky tick or a cliche, but a deep well from which the roots of his being drank from. During his Blackwatch days, the quickest way to irritate the shit out of Reyes and the rest of his cohort had been to hook his phone up to the biggest speakers he could find and blast his current earworm to high heaven. He was thrilled to find that it worked every time; even on Genji.

Reyes and his relentless training among Blackwatch missions had done a lot for Jesse when it came to the vital business of staying alive. That didn’t erase the truth that Jesse found who he was with the Deadlock gang. His aesthetic, his clothes, his food, his language, and his music. They came from grit and sweat, under a New Mexico sky. No amount of west coast Spanish cussed at him during bouts of hellfire raining down could change he that. Not that Reyes hadn’t tried. 

He didn’t care that his hat and spurs got him stares from folks. He was comfortable. He smoked cigarillos that smelled like sage and tobacco because that was what the folks he grew up with used, and it reminded him of home. He spoke Spanish with an accent because that’s how he learned on his pa’s knee before he died. 

And he listened to music that reminded him of himself. He liked the old stuff right enough like any right-thinking person should: Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Patsy Cline, could make him peek up like a dog set to hunt. But the modern stuff got him on a bone-deep level. Elliot Fernandez [1], Susie Luca [2], and an unabashed soft spot for Javier Sorin [3], to whom he eagerly lost his virginity to one summer night in ’62. 

It was his childhood melodies, memories comfortably tinted by rose-tinted lyrics, touching on age-old figures of renegades and outlaws he so admired growing up, that the music recalled to him. He hardly expected others to share that fondness. They didn’t have the nostalgia to back up the history. He was content to love them for himself. For the most part, he tried not to overexpose his friends to his songs of choice, least they become trespassers on his sacred ground. 

Overwatch’s Recall has been in operation an impressive two months, which was five weeks longer than Jesse thought they were going to get. Things were settling into a respectable routine. That didn’t mean Jesse wasn’t on alert to potential warnings. 

When Hana, Lucio, and Genji got the look of the young and the restless about them, he keyed in. His own tour of duty through that age, among all the dangers Blackwatch had to offer, primed him with a keen eye towards trouble. He wasn’t one to stifle what would surely be a fun evening for them, though he suspected he ought to confirm they didn’t burn Gibraltar to the ground. 

He suggested the drive because the alternative with these three could be the dissection, and likely destruction, of Overwatch property. Best not give Winston the headache. 

“Shotgun!” Genji yelled as McCree dug out the truck keys. Nothing high-tech. Just four wheels and a stereo-system was all he needed. A window that rolled down wouldn’t hurt nothing either. 

Hana and Lucio, willing to concede to Genji with grace, thumped into the truck bed, shaking the cabin and making McCree smile. He turned on the radio, and synced up to his phone, humming with the Mercedes Castillo song that he caught up first. 

“Ohh, but how do I trust you, cause you box like my favorite target,” he sang along as Hanzo slid into the bench seat beside him. 

Jesse raised an eyebrow in question. He didn’t break tune as he sang. “And how do I love you, when you just won’t listen to quit.” 

Hanzo snorted at him, settling in with his seatbelt, looking for all intent and purpose like he as accompanying them. Jesse hadn’t known when they picked him up, but he was surely not going to complain. 

Through the sliding back window, he heard Genji complaining as he tromped into the truck bed with Hana and Lucio. 

“I called shotgun,” he shouted. “Everyone heard me!” 

“I don’t care,” Hanzo replied in the tone of an older sibling long comfortable with pulling rank. To emphasis his point, he slid the window shut in Genji’s face. 

Guess that settled that. Jesse didn’t bother to ask why Hanzo was coming with them. He’d explain, or he wouldn’t; neither way would change him being there.

Jesse grinned as they peeled out of the garage. It took the matter of minutes, and suddenly open field stretched before them. Jesse drove over the flats as his passengers in the back whooped and hollered like any set of kids who found themselves living out a country song in the back of a pick-up truck would. With the sun blazing and the waves carrying in a steady sea breeze, they were content as lizards to let the world rush past them. 

Susie Luca came on after Mercedes Castillo— _Alice_ , the best song off her _Honey_ album. He sang the intro’s rough guitar riff before turning the volume down. Given half the chance, he’d be screaming the chorus to the heavens—when all you’ll give me is starlight and solitude, sapphire sunsets though diamond skewed altitude—Hanzo, as relaxed as he had ever seen him, tilted his head over. 

“Hmm?” he vocalized, cracking his eyes open. The rough ride Jesse gave the kids didn’t seem to bother him much. 

“Nothing,” Jesse told him. “Just figured I’d spare you.” 

“Is that Susie Luca?” 

“Yeah. Love her,” Jesse admitted. 

Hanzo hummed again. He reached out and turned the song back up. Dropping his hand, his eyes drifting closed, his head dropped against the back window. His knuckles tapped out the beat against the bench seat between them. 

“Who’d admit to loving the pursuit,” he sang along, softly. The way folks do when they don’t mean to show off, only that they can’t help but let the words out, because the song was just that good.

“Cause we’re not planning on making it out whole and safe, so Alice call it moot. Let’s fall,” he joined in, louder than before. 

“Didn’t take you for a Susie Luca fan,” he said after the song ended. 

“She played a concert in Tokyo the week of my thirteenth birthday,” he explained. “I saw a recording of it playing at the restaurant where we celebrated. She was...I had never seen a full-bodied expression of the phrase ‘devoutly passionate’ before. I kept abreast of her work after that.”

Jesse grinned. “I snuck into a music festival out in the desert when I was eleven to watch her perform.”

“Her Mandolin show?” 

“That’s the one. Had to hide in a tree, and got eaten alive by mosquitoes, but I don’t regret a moment of it.” 

“Consider me envious. The reviews said the show was legendary.”

“It was indeed, darlin’. Ask nicely and I’ll show you the shirt I nicked from the merchant stand afterward. Still got it, after all these years.”

“Show me that shirt and you’ll never get it back,” Hanzo told him. Jesse heard the smile that didn’t dare touch his face. 

The Mandolin shirt hadn’t fit Jesse in years. He kept it for the sentiment, Blackwatch training to the contrary be damned. Soft gray and comfortable as all get out, with Susie Luca’s signature silver moon and red stars logo silk-screened on the back, it had hung loose on his teenage frame. For about a decade, it fit him perfectly. As his shoulder bulked up and his stomach settled into a comfortable layer of fat and muscle, it strained. Rather than risk ruining it, he tucked it away, along with Peacekeeper’s cleaning kit and the few photographs he managed to hold onto over the years. 

He could buy a new one, he supposed. One that fit his body as it was now. It wasn’t like internet shopping didn’t make anything obtainable for the right price. But this was the shirt he stole one chilled night in the southwestern desert, high off Susie Luca’s screaming voice and convinced the ethereal existed in the night sky if only he looked for it.

It was the memory, not the object. 

He couldn’t help but wonder what the shirt would look like on Hanzo. Hanzo, who was compact where Jesse was lanky and small enough to be enveloped in any of his clothes. Luca’s shirt would be a little long on him, hitting somewhere around his thigh, maybe. His shoulders and chest would fill out the fabric, displaying the sun and stars logo as it was meant to be shown off. Around his waist, it would be loose, ready to ride up at a moment’s notice or a particularly long stretch. The loose hem would be tempting for fingers to come skating under. 

Lord, Jesse really wanted to find out if he was right.

“We’ll just have to see about that, sweethart,” he offered, brushing his knuckles against Hanzo’s thigh. He didn’t lean in, but he didn’t pull away. 

Jesse queued up the rest of _Honey at the Bottom of the Glass_ , starting with _Sunrise Requiem_. Hanzo didn’t know all the songs, but he sang along to those he did. His eyes stayed closed, and his hand relaxed. He barely moved as Jesse tore off through the open high desert around their base.

He didn’t need to explain; Jesse understood. He wanted to be nearly. He wanted to be a part of the world as Jesse saw it. 

Really, that was all Jesse needed. 

***

The kids tromped off, wind-swept and exhausted from screaming. Hanzo leaned against the door as Jesse checked for abandoned items and locked the truck. The natural, confident movement of his body captivated the eye; a dust-covered cowboy in his natural setting by a battered pick-up truck.

Jesse didn’t immediately return the keys to the lockbox. Swinging them along with his fingers, he considered Hanzo. 

“Everything alright?” 

“All’s good, baby doll,” Jesse reassured, mischief in his eyes.

“No,” Hanzo rejected. He didn’t need to specify.

“Shuchums?”

“I think not.”

“Light of my life?”

“Not on your life.”

“You don’t mind darlin’.”

“That name implies a level of respectability.”

“Well, if we’re being respectable.”

A hand around his neck, a body pressed close, urging them both against the wall, and Jesse kissed Hanzo. He had to tilt his head back, taking in Jesse’s height. Funny; he never seemed to tower when they spoke, or sparred, or smoked together. Only now, as he and Hanzo stripped away pretense. Against the door of a too-large, too-exposed garage in the complex basement, with desert dust on their skin and heat in their breath. Hanzo sank his fingers into Jesse’s belt—archer’s fingers; supreme grip strength; Jesse would go where Hanzo wanted him.

“If we don’t move this inside,” Jesse warned. “We’re gonna end up in back of this truck.”

Hanzo eyed the space, considering. He couldn’t say he was entirely opposed. The thought of Jesse in the back of a pick-up truck, willing and eager, was more than enough to overcome concerns about public exhibition or comfort. 

“Perhaps another time,” he settled on.

They walked into the Overwatch complex with a respectable distance between them. The illusion was ruined every time their knuckles brushed up against one another. It was as much patience as they were willing to offer the world for the sake of modesty. 

Their pretense was dropped with the sealing of a bedroom door. Jesse reached for Hanzo as Hanzo pushed into Jesse. They tumbled into bed. 

Hanzo contented himself in Jesse’s lap. His vantage gave him the freedom to explore without constraint. He would have continued indefinitely if Jesse’s hands, metal and flesh, cupped his jaw and pulled him up. The clear expression pulled sense from Hanzo.

“Anything I should know?” Jesse asked into the scant space between them. 

Hanzo blinked. “What?”

Jesse pulled away. “Not the best timing, I know,” he said with a wince. “But I figure better late than never. Anything I should know before we get going?” 

Hanzo thought about it. “Avoid the dragons when you can. Occasional touches are fine but they overstimulate easily, and that puts me on edge.” 

“I can do that, no problem,” Jesse assured, shifting the hand that was on his arm to his waist. “Anything else?”

“And...” Hanzo was half a breath away from saying he wasn’t picky or thoughtful when falling into bed with someone. He simply hadn’t explored enough to answer knowledgeably. The merit of Jesse’s concern stopped him from shrugging off his inexperience. 

“I haven’t done this often enough to know what I like and don’t like,” he said, matter-of-factly, because it was something Jesse needed to know. “I suppose...I don’t care what you say, but you need to say it as you mean it.” He feared the drone of his family, going through pleasantries with the passive-aggressiveness of one paying lip service to a loving tone.

Jesse grinned. “Honeybee, you’re gorgeous,” he said in a deep, sultry baritone. Hanzo snorted and shoved at his face. 

The push turned into a grapple. Hanzo enjoyed the heat and tension in their bodies as they rolled, fighting for a win neither of them were eager to immediately claim. 

“And you?” Hanzo asked. “What do I need to know about you?” 

Jesse pet his sides with reverent fingers. Softening him up, like he thought Hanzo wasn’t going to like what he heard. “I’ll never say no to kisses. More the merrier, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t like hands near my throat. Feel free to touch me anywhere else you’d like. If I say ‘get off’, I need you up and off me. Don’t mean to be nasty, just need you to do it. I don’t take kindly to degrading comments, especially about how I look. I talk like a motormouth, but I reckon you already figured that.” 

Hanzo stilled his hands over Jesse's chest hair. Anger was a useless emotion, he believed. Yet, when focused on someone who called to a quickly burgeoning protectiveness within him, his anger became an effective, brutal weapon. He had learned that with Genji, years ago. He was learning it again now. A dozen responses sprang to mind, chief among them being ‘is there someone out there I need to kill?’.

Instead, he said: “We’ve lived hazardous lives, haven’t we?” 

Jesse exhaled his nervousness, tension, and worry bleeding away under Hanzo’s palms. The grin he got was small and sincere, and Hanzo was content.

“That we have, darlin’. That we have.”

He captured Jesse’s wandering hands and dusted the flesh and metal knuckles with a single kiss each. Reverential, each action-packed with meaning. Giving Jesse the fealty so many had tried to force from him at swordpoint. It was alarming how convinced he was this man, who boasted a cowboy hat and fucking spurs on a daily basis, would not abuse the power he held over Hanzo. Because it was an immense power--Hanzo didn’t think Jesse realized yet. Life-alteringly immense. 

“Anything else?” he asked.

“Cuddle with me afterward?” Not a restriction so much as a plea. 

“If you ask nicely.”

“I’ll be as nice as you want me to be, sugar.”

Hanzo took Jesse like he meant it as the stars emerged from sunlight and sea wind carried in from the coast. Jesse talked nonstop. Hanzo discovered how good overestimation felt. 

Later, Jesse reached out for his phone in the dark. The screen lit up long enough for his fingers to tap across the screen surface. Emilio Hernandez [4] sang from the speakers.

_I can’t be waving a white flag with all the hell I’ve got planned_

The stars had waited patiently for their turn in the light of adoration. Hanzo eventually noticed them.

“Is that Jupiter?” he asked, nodding to the bright yellow dot in the sky. Genji had pointed it out yesterday evening, waxing on about his newest obsession—Star-gazing. Hanzo believed maybe every third word out of his brother’s mouth. 

“That’s Saturn,” Jesse replied. He tilted Hanzo’s chin into a sharper angle. “Red guy close to the North Star—that’s Jupiter.” 

Hanzo hummed. 

“I don’t sleep well,” he admitted, picking up the earlier conversation. “You should know.” 

Jesse rubbed along his back. “I don’t either. Too many voices.”

“You hear them?” 

“Yeah. Do you not?”

“Not so much. They stare at me. It is their expressions I cannot escape.”

“It’s amazing what a look can make you do. All it ever took for me was a side-eye and just a hint of disapproval. Had me jumping in my boots.”

“Yes—it does not matter that their expectations are intolerable. Even dead, they still have power.”

“Don’t I know it. The failure takes you out at the knees. Terrifying.” 

“It was.” 

“We’ll just have to keep each other company instead.” 

“I would like that.”

Hanzo kissed Jesse and sealed it for both of them. 

*** 

“Come on now, darlin’. Give it up.”

“You first,” Hanzo demanded, emphasizing each syllable with a tug to Jesse’s hair. Their endless game of one-up-manship had Jesse planting a sharp bite under his ear.

Hanzo groaned, deep and guttural, pulling on decades of training to keep still. He leaned back with his thighs open, a vulnerable, undefendable pose to sustain for longer than a moment. _Lewd_ was the word running through his head, bringing all the shame his elders could pack into it. Jesse lay protected between his legs, hands exploring freely down his torso and mouth busy at his jawline, added to Hanzo’s exhibition. 

There were no clocks in ready sight. Time had no place in the space between them. When Jesse pulled back, Hanzo’s hands clamped down, resisting the loss. His intensity was a surprise—he hadn’t considered the idea of Jesse leaving to be that frightening. It wasn’t as if he was going anywhere. A simple shift of weight, and a more comfortable lean for them both. 

Jesse flexed his body under Hanzo’s grip; not a warning, just a question. His eyes were easy and kind. Hanzo fell into them. 

“Apologies,” Hanzo muttered as he loosened just enough. “The thought of you leaving unsettled me.”

He expected laughter and mocking assurance; he got contemplation and quiet hesitation. Jesse’s breath hitched into the skin under his jaw, passion escalating too quickly into devotion. His eyes were pressed closed, his hands shook; metal vibrates against Hanzo’s ribs. 

“Wasn’t planning on going anywhere, honeybee.”

Really, they were going to have to discuss these names. Sometime later. 

Hanzo gripped Jesse tight and pulled him further in. This was his defiance and his assurance. This— _this_ was what would save them. 

“Jesse, look at me,” he ordered. He didn’t use his clan voice, that he spent years mastering and that had Genji snarling at him once upon a time. That only hurt and harmed his loved ones. This one came from the dragons, deep, ageless, and undeniable.

Jesse’s honey-gold eyes opened. His hands stilled, rediscovered their purpose for worship. His nerves calmed, and in turn, calmed Hanzo. Inextricably, they sunk anchors into one another. 

**Boom**. The door rattled on its hinges as a pair of fists collided with it.

Hanzo snarled and sat up; Jesse groaned and sat back. “The hell?” he muttered, quiet. Hanzo soothed the irritation with a thumb across his bicep, and Jesse stilled over him.

“Go away,” Hanzo called, beyond polite. He brought his hand up to trace stars into Jesse’s neck, around the edge of his hairline. 

“Hanzo! Open the door!” Genji yelled, heedless of the hour or decorum. 

“Fuck,” Jesse grumbled. 

“My thoughts exactly,” Hanzo muttered, suddenly exhausted. Not how he expected, or desired, his morning to go.

There was no keeping his brother out. Decades of experience had taught him the folly in illusions of privacy. Giving himself a few lingering, greedy touches along Jesse’s chest and shoulders, Hanzo pulled himself from the bed and found enough clothes to keep himself in slim modesty.

He cracked the door, morbidly hoping for a last-minute emergency of some kind to distract Genji from the coming fit. His brother did nothing half-way, or appropriately. A trait that had not been lost with his resurrection. 

Genji took the opportunity of an inch to go a mile and pushed his way past Hanzo into the room. Jesse had enough time to pull the covers up to his waist and avoid at least that awkwardness. Not that his bare chest and toes left much to the imagination. 

“What is this?” Genji demanded. 

Bitterly awake, Hanzo ducked the obvious by starting enough tea water for both his brother and himself, despite Genji’s rudeness. Running short on sleep, he hoped breakfast would heat his bones and organize his thoughts. Would subside the unfulfilled lust and the harsh impatience Genji’s abrupt arrival imposed. 

Jesse glanced between the brothers; Hanzo’s disgruntled grogginess and Genji’s flaring, explosive anger. He then climbed out of bed, bare as his birth and not an ounce of shame to make up for it, and pressed a kiss into Hanzo’s hair.

“Think I’ll catch up with you after you’re done here, sweetheart,” he said as he stretched.

Well, if Hanzo thought he could swing this situation into something it wasn’t, there went any hope. Genji glared at him while he ambled for his clothes and left with a tip of his hat in Hanzo’s direction.

Whether by accident or design, Jesse had left his flannel shirt, taking only his jeans and faded undershirt, and his myriad accessories. Hanzo has no compunctions against absconding with it either way. Maroon and navy plaid flannel—one of his favorites in Jesse’s collection. 

“Found it in a bargain bin at a flea market,” Jesse had told him when he complimented the color against his brown skin. “Cost me all of a psalm and a flea.” 

“Hence the name, flea market, one would imagine.” 

“One would indeed, darlin’,” he had grinned with a saucy wink. Then he had proceeded to take the shirt off. Hanzo had had no objections to that, either. 

He shrugged the shirt on, the oversized fabric falling around him in comforting warmth. Rolling up the sleeves, he took the tea off the heater plate.

“It is early,” he commented. The Genji he remembered rarely rose before noon. The sunrise was just starting to color the sky outside his window. Time once again exerted an overbearing presence.

“McCree,” Genji said with heavy judgment. That was another new trait of his brother’s—single-mindedness. Hanzo achingly wished for the days he could distract Genji with a word and a trick of attention. No such luck recently. 

“I fail to see how this is your business.” He shielded his private life from his family’s scrutiny—he always had, insomuch that his personal life existed in fits and starts under clan pressure.

Just as quickly as his anger overtook him, Genji deflated, his shoulders looking their tension, his voice mellowing. “It’s...sorry, you surprised me.”

Hanzo was glad to know that this part of his brother—who ran hot and cold in the span of a heartbeat, who could shrug off emotions at the drop of a pin—was still intact. It was what made Genji who he was, part of what Hanzo loves about him. No amount of cybertronics could change that. 

“No need for surprise over something that does not affect you,” he lightly scolded.

“Do you not wish to reconcile?”

Hanzo jerked, brought up short by Genji’s soft words. “Of course. I would not be here otherwise. In Gibraltar,” he added before Genji could misconstrue his comment.

“Then...brother, I’m allowed to ask it to be my business. If you’re serious. This is the type of thing family talks about.” 

His words struck Hanzo deeply. They were no longer at the mercy of clan etiquette and demands. In place of propriety, they must rely on communication. Not Hanzo’s strong suit. 

He sat on his rumpled bed. Since Genji, uninvited or no, was his guest, he was offered the desk chair. 

“Do you disapprove?” he asked. It was an intimidating question to ask—he didn’t know what he would do if Jesse and Genji stood at odds with one another around him. Frankly, he had never considered the possibility. They always appeared to be on friendly footing when interacting around the base. It had pulled him into a false lull of security. His misstep.

If missions with Overwatch taught him anything, Jesse often appeared on friendly footing right up until he started shooting. Perhaps not the best of gauges. 

“No,” Genji said, easing Hanzo’s world. “I don’t think I’d ever disapprove of someone you found friendship and comfort in. I do worry. I don’t know McCree well.” 

“I thought you both served with Blackwatch.”

Genji sagged into the seat. Exhaustion overtook his eyes, all that was exposed with his lower faceplate on. A small, malicious part of Hanzo nurtured from a decade ago reveled in the reversal—how many times had Genji put that expression on his face in their youth? Hanzo refused to feel guilty. Jesse was not the rotten riot Genji sought company with once upon a time. 

“We served in Blackwatch together,” Genji confirmed. “But that doesn’t mean much; we were frequently at odds. I was...very angry, back then. Hell-bent on revenge, and on becoming stronger.” 

He tapped his fingers against his knee—metal pings echoed in Hanzo’s teeth. He said nothing—Genji could find his words in his own time. It hurt to see him struggling. Genji, even after all this time, was a free-spirit who loved the high emotions of life—passion, adulation, anger, ecstasy. The tangled, slow slog of reflection showed, and Hanzo never liked to see his brother in pain.

That was what led them to their current skewed situation—people trying to solve Genji’s problems for him. Hanzo held his tongue and waited in pin-prick agony.

Sure enough...

“By the time I came along,” Genji said haltingly. “McCree was distancing himself from Reyes and Blackwatch. He and I didn’t speak much; when we did, it was to argue. We were in competition for Reyes’ attention—he loved playing us against one another. He considered it a creative problem-solving exercise. One day, McCree packed and left. No warning, no explanation, no discharge. Reyes was furious; I still wonder why he didn’t order me to track McCree down. Four years later, the cowboy shows up to the Recall like nothing happened. I don’t think I ever really knew him.” 

Hanzo knew parts of the story Genji didn’t. He had no intention of revealing that, as it was not his place to speak to it. But it did paint a clearer picture. 

They combatted their insomnia and their burdens in a multitude of ways. Physicality was simply one tool of many. Some nights they fucked—some nights they talked. Jesse had more experience escaping. He could see the warning signs. He taught a few to Hanzo as they spoke of unseen dangers.

“We understand one another,” he offered. He really couldn’t explain their shared intimacy without dragging Genji down a path neither of them were ready to travel together.

“Are you happy?” Genji asked suddenly. Hanzo wished he had asked that same question a decade ago. 

“What sent you to my door so early?” he deflected.

“So late—Hana and I were running an all-night gaming session. She threw you and McCree at me as a distraction for the points grab she picked up while I flailed.” 

Hanzo hadn’t known Hana had noticed them enough to weaponize their connection against Genji so effectively. “She is a skilled tactician. Her use of her opponent’s weakness is admirable.” 

Genji glared at him. Hanzo let his expression fall into regal stillness so as not to laugh. That would be undignified. 

“You didn’t answer my question.” Definitely not the same Genji. Years ago, that little distraction would have bought him an hour-long rant on Hana’s underhanded tactics.

“I’m sad thinking no one will have this conversation with Jesse,” he was willing to admit. “No one is concerned with whether I’m good for him. Or good to him.” 

That did hurt. As much as Hanzo disapproved of theatrics, Jesse deserved someone who would kill for his best interests. 

“Ana would have, back during Blackwatch days—she had taken a shine to McCree, way back when,” Genji admitted. “Fareeha, if she knows, but she’s wrapped up with her work. Reyes, once upon a time—maybe.”

“The day I take warnings from a man like Reyes is the day you load me on a pyre,” Hanzo snapped. No, absolutely not. Not after the wounds he found left by that man. The emotional outburst shot Genji’s eyebrows shot up his forehead.

“You never met him.”

“I didn’t need to—I see more than enough of the damaged he reaped.” On Jesse, yes. But also on Genji. In his focus, and the ruthlessness and a drive in battle, he didn’t recognize. An edge lined Genji now, one that made him all the clan had ever wanted him to be and more. 

He was still the sparrow who flirted through life at Hanamura. But as a warrior of Overwatch, he had been tempered, molded, and formed by people Hanzo didn’t know or trust. Without his knowledge or supervision, Genji had become a dragon in his own right. He felt like he lost a brother to Reyes; more so than he had lost Genji to Zenyatta or Dr. Ziegler.

He wondered if this was how his father suffered when Hanzo had reported his first kill.

“One could see the same damage you caused when they look at me.” The conversation has spiraled out of control and neither brother knew how to maneuver back to safe ground. 

“Yes; it can be said. And here I am, having awkward conversations and helping an organization I do not believe in.” Yet. “You asked me to live. I am doing so, as best I can.”

“And schtupping cowboys in your free time.”

“Schtupping? Where do you pick these things up?”

“I travel. I learn things. Reyes cared, anija.”

Hanzo’s tongue stilled, stunned. It was the first time Genji had used that word in a long time. It was unfair he used it so viciously—Hanzo’s heart hurt so much from longing he was willing to throw the argument, no matter that he disagreed with the statement Genji had pinned it against.

The clan elders cared as well, about the wrong things. Care and manipulation rested hand in hand: people thrived in the gray matter space created by contradictions. Genji was not in a place to see that—his world reflected his own journey from carefree layabout to driven warrior. He would not yet understand Hanzo’s burdens.

They had touched on this subject enough. Hanzo quickly moved to put them both out of their misery. 

“Is there anything you’d like to tell me?” he asked. “Reconnection works both ways, after all.” 

Put on the spot, Genji cut short their conversation. Hanzo suspected it was for the best. 

*** 

Leaving Hanzo to deal with the volcano building on Mt. Genji, Jesse decided he wanted breakfast. He didn’t bother changing clothes—he was comfortable, and there was no one to dress him down for being out of uniform. 

He considered his next few hours; he had a small window to work with before rumors flew from one end of Overwatch to the other. Pulling his phone out, he scrolled through his contacts.

He didn’t talk to Fareeha much—their relationship worked better in text. They both preferred it. For two people brought together by violence, circumstance, and the kind of trauma only Overwatch could bring, they found front-facing communication difficult. Writing Sit Reps to one another was easier, was cleaner, was calmer, then listening to one another struggle through conversations. 

More tolerable to pick the words out on a screen, to say exactly what he meant to say, and not let his tongue run away with his temper. 

Keeping his temper mattered because Fareeha was the last relation he had, and he dearly wanted to hold onto her regard. She knew him as well as he knew himself. And, like Hanzo, she understood the guilt, the obligation, and the tangled web of emotions their pasts handed them. 

Jesse combatted Reyes and Deadlock every day, in every way. Hanzo battled against his clan elders like a pissed off scorpion pushing across the desert. Fareeha’s fight was with her mother and her memory. Hers was no less debilitated when she failed. Legacies were horrific like that.

He composed a quick email to her on his phone. It went like this:

_Fareeha,_

_You told me to write to you more. HSI better be treating you right. You know I’ve always got a place for you if not._

_I’m seeing Hanzo Shimada—Genji’s older brother. It’s new. It’s working, so far. He and I got most of the complicated stuff worked out already. Figured that’s a good sign._

_Genji found out about an hour ago. I think Hanzo’s still trying to talk the poor kid off the ledge._

_You know how much I hate being rumor fodder, so I thought I’d tell you before someone else did. Betting most folks will know by the end of the day. Put people in a box on a cliff and all they’ll do is talk._

_Stay alive, sister._

_Jesse_

He sent his draft through a grammar app because he wasn’t in the mood to proof-read. He encrypted it because that was the only kind of email Fareeha opened. He hit send and tried not to think about it. He checked the news on his phone instead, catching up on the local landscape.

Freedom meant the most with the little decisions he could make for himself. He got coffee, forgoing any cream or sugar. He treated himself to a doughy biscuit covered in honey and butter. He scheduled a session of training simulations with Winston in the afternoon, because he was more alert then. He chatted with Lena about nothing through their secure messaging app. He played a quick round in his favorite crossword game.

Fareeha made him think of Ana. Thinking of Ana made him think of Peacemaker. To bring the twitching in his fingers under control, he found a quiet, shade-laden place outside. He dismantled and cleaned Peacemaker, coffee close by as he worked. The sun rose in front of him in multi-colored panorama. 

His phone lit up with an alert. Jesse experienced a strange sense of apprehension as he saw he had an email. Faster than he thought.

Fareeha’s approval mattered more to Jesse than he originally anticipated. He had taken the time to tell her about Hanzo since age, time, and experience forged a deep trust with her; he didn’t want to find a rattler at the other end of the email, hissing threats or concerns over his decisions.

If she reacted like Genji, Jesse was sure he wouldn’t be talking to her for months. He was too old to have folks yelling at him. 

With a refreshed cup of coffee, he opened her reply. She replied in Arabic; she liked to make him work for it. 

_-JM,_

_You drop information like bombs—throw them out and duck in cover. My mother taught you that skill, didn’t she?_

_Genji told me about his brother once or twice. Serious fella, by the sound of it—nice and honorable. Good traits for longevity._

_HSI is in the midst of a massive project that has me running from one end of Egypt to the other. Traveling gives me plenty of time to read—tell me more when you want._

_Overwatch better be treating you right. You know I’ve got a place for you (and your man) if they’re not._

_Stay alive, brother._

_-FA_

That, Jesse mused with deep relief, was the closest he ever wanted to approval or encouragement. Fareeha carried pragmatism and idealism in equal measure. It let her see folks clear and true, something that eluded many tainted by the Overwatch of old. She knew not to judge or demand from Jesse. 

Going on twenty years and he still couldn’t convince her he didn’t need protecting. After Ana’s death, Fareeha guarded her relationships like a shark. The udjat tattoo, something Jesse quietly disapproved of and fretted over with every headache Fareeha complained of, had only intensified her desire to keep her relations safe. He never wanted he to worry for him; he spent more than enough time concerned over her. Life for messy like that.

He set his phone aside, lit a cigarillo, and let the Gibraltar morning warm his toes. Freedom, hard-fought-for and protected zealously, felt divine to Jesse. He’d never surrender it.

It came with a price, though. Hanzo understood the double-edged blade of freedom, and that understanding ran like a current between them, connecting them. They got saw one another because they were willing to walk over that double-edge for so long. 

Jesse felt a little spoiled. Hanzo was beautiful and confident. Strong, aware, and unshakable. He carried the kind of pain that Jesse recognized from his own scars, long healed and unmistakable. Isolation was the quickest escape from the kind of agony brought on by guilt and fear; it was a remedy both of them had over-medicated with for years. 

All that work, ruined in the span of a few weeks. Jesse suspected he and Hanzo would soon be revising their understanding of what freedom and connections could be.  


***

Hanzo spent enough nights in Jesse’s room to warrant a phone charger of his own on the nightstand. He saw the email from Genji when he unplugged the device after his shower that nearly turned into their shower after Jesse caught him grabbing an eyeful while Jesse shaved at the sink. He ignored the email until he had food—with Genji it could be anything from an article on the projections of Japanese economic markets to cute cat videos to his latest Sit Rep accidentally emailed to Hanzo rather than Winston. He’d sort it out after breakfast. 

Sat in a deep-seated chair, with his feet on Jesse’s armrest, his tea balanced on his tablet, and disgracing every ancestor for a thousand years with his posture, he gave the email a cursory glance. 

The email contained a link and a line of exclamation points, followed by a line of question marks. The link sent him to a log in page he didn’t recognize. 

“I don’t know what this is,” he said, flashing the screen towards Jesse. Swallowing around his coffee—black and burnt, because Jesse was nothing if not dedicated to his roots—he made grabbing motions for the phone.

“It’s the Blackboard, babe. Folks post bounty information on it. Here—,” he logged into with his own credentials. “Try it now.” 

Hanzo refreshes the link and saw himself from nearly a decade ago when he was fresh out of university. His hair was short and neat, and his face not yet lined with the stress that was to come. Under it read: **WANTED FOR MULTIPLE KIN-KILLINGS AND CLAN-DESERTION.**

The page went on to list his skills and his kills. The details of his crimes were woefully inadequate and his listed known aliases were years out-of-date. 

Kin-killing—he wondered if that included Genji. Was it kin-killing when the killing was kin-sanctioned? He certainly didn’t consider the horde of distant relations sent for his head after his desertion kin. 

Across the bottom of the screen read **RESCINDED. NO REWARD CURRENTLY OFFERED.**

“Well I’ll be damned,” Jesse commented when Hanzo showed him the page. “Someone cancelled your bounty. Any idea why?” 

“Perhaps they have decided it is not worth the hassle anymore.” 

“You really believe that?”

“No. Likely they are no longer able to meet the set price. Genji told me Blackwatch froze any Shimada accounts they could during the crack down.” 

“Yeah, but we knew we never found them all.” 

“Then let us hope they decided to put what money they had to better use than running me down.” 

Jesse’s mouth swished across his face—he was never one to let a thing sit and rest. Hanzo, frankly, was content to let the mess be done and the past laid to fitful rest. If a decade’s worth of blood had finally convinced the remnants of his family to let leave, so much the better. 

“What about Genji?” he wondered. He hesitated to search for it; as if the act of investigation would draw the eyes of hostile foes.

“Genji never had a bounty from the Shimada clan. They all thought he was dead.”

Hanzo’s defenses were low in the morning: memories overtook easier. The tatami mats had been stained with Genji’s blood as he had knelt in shock before the clan elders. In the days to follow, as the true horror of what he had done seeped in, he could recall the bloody pattern he left. A decade later, he could draw it from memory. 

The fingers of Jesse’s flesh hand, warmed from coffee and dry from Gibraltar heat, skated over his ticklish ankles. Hanzo nearly kicked him in the face in retaliation. 

The impromptu wrestling match was made challenging with a coffee mug and teacup dancing between them. It was all fun and games until morning brews were threatened. 

Hanzo preferred his new seat on Jesse’s lap. It gave him free-reign to explore. 

“Wanna see mine?” Jesse asked. Hanzo’s eyes slid down Jesse’s torso, suggestion thick in every syllable of his unspoken sentence. Red-cheeked, the cowboy pulled his hat down over his face. 

“I meant my bounty, you demon-minded fiend.” 

Unashamed and content, Hanzo dropped the phone in his hand.

What did it matter that his family had finally given up their pursuit of him? All the better, he thought. Maybe no more kin need be killed. 

Apocryphal words, as it turned out.

***

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[2] Susie Luca is a Panamanian country musician. Through the midcentury, Susie Luca, along with Mercedes Castillo and Joseph Fabrega, brought Renegade Country to mainstream attention. Defined by its tradition of antiestablishmentarianism and socio-economic inequity, many of her singles became rallying anthems against government oversight and corruption. Her sixth studio album _Honey at the Bottom of the Glass_ (2059), is widely beloved by critics and audiences alike. 

[3] Javier Sorin is an American country and rock musician. His single, _Late in the Heat_ , burned up social media and recording charts during the summer of 2062. 

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	2. take it easy; i'm not tryna go against you, actually I'm going with you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Hanzo is reminded that family comes for you from both sides of the aisle. Jesse performs an old trick.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks everyone. You're awesome. 
> 
> Still traveling. Still writing on my phone. Please excuse typos. 
> 
> Go listen to Rihanna's Desperado on repeat while you read. That's what I've been doing.

It was oft-repeated that those who met Zenyatta were never the same. Usually, by Genji. Having just met Zenyatta, Hanzo could confirm it as truth. He was never going to have peace of mind again. 

"Perfect timing, master!" Genji chirped, all enthusiasm and adoration. The hyper train purred to life under their feet, pulling steadily, inevitably, and unrelentingly away from the station. Escape made impossible. Hanzo cursed himself a fool. His effervescent brother was not some masterfully subtle tactician; he banked on past proven evidence. Hanzo let Genji get away with anything if he used the right tone and words. 

"I love trains!" Genji had claimed when they arranged their travel. "And it's been so long since we've seen the countryside. Come on, anija, it will be beautiful! Why not enjoy your homeland, now that you can walk through it without looking over your shoulder?" 

Hanzo had indulged that he thought was his brother's flight of fancy, happy to find a connection with Genji that did not involve Overwatch or a mission. He regretted that familial impulse. 

"This was an ambush," he accused. He did not bother to moderate his voice. 

"It was not!" Genji did not have the good grace to look ashamed of himself as he lied through his teeth. "It was simply good luck that Zenyatta was nearby after our mission. And what luck, a nice train ride to Tokyo can be just the thing for the two of you to get to know one another." 

Twice a fool; Hanzo should have seen something like this coming. Genji had been on him for weeks to meet his master, the omnic who helped him find peace within himself and his body. Hanzo had ducked out each time, reluctant to face the one responsible for his brother's contentment. There was likely very little Zenyatta could offer Hanzo beyond a cold shoulder built on frigid disapproval. Hanzo was the man who offered death to his pupil. There was nothing they had in common; even the sides of Genji they knew were different. 

He looked back on his past anxieties with a fond sense of unrequited desire. If only he had gotten the cold shoulder. Instead, it appeared that Zenyatta was as earnestly excited to meet Hanzo as Genji was to introduce him. 

Zenyatta tilted his head in a manner that read as friendly and open. Hanzo, immediately disdainful of the implications of their conversation, grabbed for a distraction. Jesse offered a desperate beacon for escape; Hanzo thumbed open his secure messaging app and found their latest conversation thread. 

**From: Hanzo**  
it was a trap. zenyatta was waiting for us on the train

 **From: Jesse**  
worlds full of suckers and swindlers, babe

 **From: Hanzo**  
are you implying I am a sucker 

**From: Jesse**  
well darling you're not a swindler. guess that only leaves option a 

**From: Hanzo**  
miscreant. you are a poor excuse for a swindler 

Jesse did not reply--he had been parked on a roof in Morocco for the last three days, waiting for the Talon agent in his sights to either move or rendezvous with their information source. Jesse chatted with Hanzo over text during his downtime, when attention allowed. The disadvantage of stake-out missions was that downtime and active duty rarely delineated. Jesse disappeared from conversations for hours at a time without warning when changes came. 

Disappointed but unsurprised, Hanzo tucked his phone away. Hyper trains were quick--they would arrive in Tokyo soon enough. 

Once they were well and clear of the station, Genji excused himself to fetch refreshments.

"Your transparency is shameful," Hanzo spat. 

"Behave, anija!" Genji learned to use that word as a weapon, hobbling Hanzo's defenses from the start. Sucker that Jesse believed him to be, it worked every time. Hanzo let his brother slip away as he settled into their private compartment. Genji had been sly enough to remove the public from Hanzo's discomfort. 

Genji's retreat left Hanzo in an odd lull without an avenue for engagement. Zenyatta was a calm compartment mate, covering in the lotus position over his seat. His ease disturbed Hanzo, highlighting his fidgeting, nervous energy. The omnic did not ignore their anxious silence so much as aggressively, cheerfully, relentlessly attack it with openness. That meant conversation. Hanzo’s skills in that area had not improved. His phone reappeared under restless fingers. 

**From: Hanzo**  
how do you talk to people? 

Fate favored him; Jesse replied within a minute. 

**From: Jesse**  
retorical question? 

**From: Hanzo**  
no

 **From: Jesse**  
ask him about his day 

"How is your day?" 

"It's well," Zenyatta replied. "An excellent day for traveling." 

“That is good. How are you enjoying Japan?" The banality hurt Hanzo's teeth. 

“It's beautiful," Zenyatta gushed appropriately. "Are you happy to be home? Genji told me that with your bounty removed roaming the country has become much easier." 

Genji could not keep a thought to himself. Hanzo had not failed to notice the suspiciously long time his brother had been absent. Unwilling to pursue the uncomfortable line of conversation further, he returned to Jesse. 

**From: Hanzo**  
what next? 

**From: Jesse**  
ask him about his day yesterday 

"How is Jesse?" 

Hanzo jerked, staring hard at Zenyatta. "I beg your pardon?" 

"I asked: how is Jesse?" 

"I would not know," Hanzo lied before he could stop himself. It was instinct to cover his weak points. A lifetime of organizing criminal enterprises taught him to hide what could be used to hurt him under a thick layer of denial. And Jesse could be used to hurt Hanzo. 

Zenyatta’s body conveyed all his concern and empathy without a human face that changed or mirrored expressions. "You are unsettled," the omnic said. 

“Very much so.” May as well be honest.

“Would you meditate with me? I have found it to be a powerful bonding experience. It could help ease your unbalance.” 

“No,” Hanzo vetoed. He had not meditated in years; he would not start now, in the presence of a stranger who brought him discomfort surrounded by land he had until recently been unwelcome to pay homage. 

“I understand. Past experiences can often infiltrate and corrupt the process. Still, much like weapons-work and exercise, mental clarity can bring peace." 

"I have peace enough." It was not a lie. The phone in his hand, and the man on the other end, confirmed it.

"Peace found in another is a beautiful thing," Zenyatta agreed. "I believe we are less than whole without that. Do we not, then, owe it to those who grant us peace to offer it in return?" 

"To attempt peace with me would be to attempt the impossible." 

"How so?" 

"My emotions will not easily be dismissed. They have overgrown when I was of a mind to let them. Uprooting them now will bring the whole garden to ruin." It was easier to speak in gardening metaphors than explain his disharmony to Zenyatta. Hanzo's state of being was a result of his destruction of Genji and his abandonment of the clan. There was no putting that to rest, no meditation that would ease his depression and anxiety. Better, he had discovered over the years, to isolate his well-nurtured garden with thick walls and spiked ivy. 

"Emotions are a crucial aspect of life and living. Emotions also pass. Nothing lasts forever. You have no difficulty naming your emotions; would you allow them room to grow and mature? Their evolution could bring you relief from your pain." 

Hanzo prayed for something— _anything_ —to interrupt them. He did not approve of the impromptu dissection of his morals and burdens. 

**Boom!** Genji burst into their compartment, panicked words flying as he scrambled into their tight space. Hanzo, of a mind to scold his brother for numerous infractions, froze under Genji's look of terror. 

“Wh-,” 

“Shimada assassins,” Genji gasped. “Two cars over—we just made one another. They’re right behind me.”

So much for a rescinded bounty. 

“How many?” he snapped as he ripped the case that held Storm Bow apart. 

“I saw four. Could be more.” 

Hanzo grunted his acknowledgment. He set his first arrow as Genji took up a defense in front of Zenyatta. He wished he had time to text Jesse. 

"An attack in broad daylight?" Genji muttered. "Have they last all sense?" 

"It would seem," Hanzo replied. "It's never been this before. Civilians and witnesses aplenty. This is a mess of an operation, if it is such a thing." 

"It's likely they own half the train." 

"And they must have made us before we boarded. Why not take the kill-shot then? They must have sighted it a dozen times over without us realizing. Letting us fight is a dangerous gamble." 

"Yes. Stay or move?" 

Stay: keep command of a set area, but lose all mobility and scouting capabilities. He and Genji would only get in one another's way in the tight space. Move: open up their versatility, but lose the protection of four walls. 

His decision was made for him when the window of their compartment exploded. Hanzo ducked low to avoid a face full of glass. He shot blind over his shoulder, using the smudged reflections in the chrome decor as his guide. He hit one. Two more crawled into the compartment. 

"Move!" he ordered, covering their exit. Genji ripped the door open and was immediately engaged. 

There were more than four waiting for them. By quick count, Hanzo identified seven in the train hallway. All of them dressed in nondescript, unremarkable clothing and masked. He suspected at least two on the roof by their heavy footfalls. Their overwhelming level of infiltration spoke to local turf or bribery--likely both. Half the train could be assailants. 

Hanzo lined up a shot over Genji's head. He drew; breathed in, and released on the out; another one down. Another took advantage of his distraction, and rushed inside the reach of his arrows. Hanzo cursed and slashed Storm Bow wide, sending the wave back. When another persisted he grabbed their shirt and spun, tossing them throug hthe broken window and into the speeding wind. 

Pain exploded from his side--someone slammed a trencheon into his ribs, bringing him to his knees. Nonlethal; that didn't make his bones ache any less. 

One of their attackers was fast; they appeared inside Hanzo's reach. He braced and took a blow from a truncheon to his side. Nonlethal; that didn't make his ribs ache any less. He sucked in a breath through the pain and reached out for the first limb his hands fell upon. He snapped the attacker's collarbone — the truncheon fell useless to the floor. His victim was pulled back by his fellows, and a new one crowded in close. 

Too many. There were to damn many. 

When plans continuously fail, orchestrate anew. It was the oldest strategy in the book Hanzo had spent his childhood memorizing. Of course, the clan would attempt a full-front attack after a decade of failure. They could afford to wear Hanzo down with relentless waves of assault--where was he going to go? Jump from the train? The fall would kill him. 

"Fall back down the train," he ordered. Zenyatta and Genji were quick to comply. Small miracles. 

Two assailants down by Storm Bow, another by Genji's blade. The close confines of the train limited his reach, his shots. Genji's path was well-marked by blood spatter and bisected limbs. Hanzo did not expect much of Zenyatta as a combatant, but the omnic held his own without slowing them down.

They steadily lost ground--their opponents were quick to cage them in, push them on, using the environment to their advantage, and civilians as shields. Hanzo had sighted ten active enemies once they hit the last train car. Still far too many. He was near out of arrows. 

Genji squared up beside him, katana at the ready. 

Hanzo made a decision. It wasn’t even a difficult one. He threw open the back door of the train--countryside blurred past them. The wind screamed and yanked at him, urging him down into the speeding ground. The day was beautiful--white, fully clouds against a clear blue sky. The sun was a cheerful ball of warmth and light. Fitting enough, Hanzo supposed. 

“Genji,” he called. His brother, grim and angry, acknowledged him with a quick look. 

“What?” 

Hanzo thrust out a hand, grabbed Genji by the back of the neck, and dragged his brother close. 

“I love you,” he admitted, pressing a dry kiss to the forehead of his faceplate. The placement wasn’t the point; the action was what they would both remember. With Genji stunned into silence, it was the work of a moment to kick him into Zenyatta, and send them both spiraling into the sky.

Zenyatta was an omnic; Genji's cybernetics were repairable. They would both survive the jump. They would be able to run. They would be safe. Hanzo did not care about details beyond his logic. 

He could hear his brother screaming for him, getting fainter by the second. With fierce, ugly determination, Hanzo raised Storm Bow. They would take him, he knew. No-kill shots; nonlethal force; pinned down on a moving train; they wanted him alive. A living bounty meant death would come later, slower, and more painfully. 

Hanzo's only strategy was to make things difficult and costly for them. And put as much distance between Genji and their clan as possible. 

They surrounded Hanzo within moments. One, bleeding from his shoulder, hand-signaled for rest. He removed his blank, black mask. Hanzo did not lower his arrow, aiming for the man's exposed eye. He looked around Hanzo's age and bore himself with the same tension he spent a lifetime learning. Hanzo did not recognize him. That worried him. "Cease this pettiness, cousin. You've lost. Accept it with some grace." 

Hanzo took his shot. Lightening-quick, one assailant behind the unmasked man reached out and caught the arrow before it impacted. Enhanced by speed-amps, no doubt. Hanzo felt bitterly robbed. It had been his last arrow. 

"Are we done?" the unmasked man asked. It was his tone that infuriated Hanzo. Prideful, dripping with scorn and condescension. As if Hanzo was a child fighting off the inevitability of bedtime. 

Hanzo reached into his pocket; every one of his assailants tensed. Phone in hand, he tapped the screen's shortcut for the camera. Intentionally, deliberately, he snapped a photo of the man and sent it to the first contact on his list--Jesse. Hanzo got his wish after all. He threw the phone after Genji onto the train tracks. It would be a smashed mess by the time anyone thought to look for it. 

"We are not done," he said. He lunged for the masked man. Bone splintered under his hands before he was brought down. 

*** 

Jesse was deep into a pre-packaged dinner when his phone pinged. He ate outside in the shade of the overhanging buildings, half an eye on the bleak little window across the street. Every once in a while, his target's shadow passed over the blinds. They knew eyes were on them; they just hadn't found Jesse yet.

His phone pinged a silent alert; Hanzo's familiar name and contact avatar flashed. Excitement, new and heady, ceased Jesse. 

Jesse kept his attention focused on the window; he was a professional. The work was made more comfortable with a message from Hanzo waiting once his watch ended. The carrot that prodded him faster than any threat of punishment. He hoped Reyes was rolling in his grave over that. 

A local military ex-pat who owed Tracer a favor relieved Jesse a four hours later. He waited until he was good and away from the watched apartment until he pulled out his phone. Hanzo had sent him a photo--that was new. Hanzo preferred to leave no digital fingerprints over his life. Binary evidence was proof of connections. Connections, Hanzo's past warned him, bred pain. It had been his connection to Genji that the clan elders had abused, and his relationship to his honor and family they had harnessed. 

He was in Japan, Jesse remembered. Something about a troubling extremist group collecting recruits to target omnic communities. Jesse suspected the operation was a bust. But the excuse to return to Japan had been too alluring for Hanzo, after so long in exile. 

The picture Hanzo sent him was a little blurry--for a moment Jesse thought maybe Genji had stolen the phone to take a candid shot of Hanzo. Then he saw the sword; saw the malicious little smirk; saw the arrows embedded in the wall behind the man. Jesse's good humor dropped away like a stone as his instincts sharpened to a brutal point. 

He zoomed into the face in the photograph; not Hanzo. But the formation of his jaw as it led into his neck, and the way his hair behaved struck him. Anyone with a family resemblance to Hanzo in Japan wasn't a good thing. Dread built up in Jesse's chest. 

Connections bred pain. It wasn't just the Shimada clan elders who subscribed to the ruthless methodology. Reyes had hammered that point into Jesse as well. He hated when the bastard was right, his presence stretching beyond the grave to slap a taunt across Jesse's face. The pain spreading to his extremities was harrowing. His eyes itched something fierce. 

Jesse called Hanzo and got his voicemail. Genji's number went similarly unanswered. 

"Athena," he called. His phone screen shuddered. "Tell me who this is." 

****

Hanzo awoke on a futon in a familiar room. 

No, not quite familiar. It was more the atmosphere than the room itself that struck him. The tatami under him, the fusuma walls, the shoji, sunlight shining through, that oriented him to the perimeter of the building. 

He gently ran his fingers over the mats; took deep breaths to identify in the incense-laced air; listened for the echo of water over stone; searched for anything that was out of place or incorrect. He found no inauthenticities or mimicries. He was home, then. But why? 

While he woke alone, he assumed he was under long-distance surveillance. His injuries were tended, bandaged, and healing. Serviceable work, if old-fashioned. Stitches in his shoulder, linen wraps stained with sluggish blood, and no evidence of advanced medical healing.

He found the steel bands quick enough. The first looped around his left wrist, teasing the edge of his tattoo. Another just below his elbow. A final one circled his bicep. There were no other bands on his body—only those three, moving up his arm with the dragons. He couldn’t see any hinges or locks on them. How had they been fitted onto him? When he flexed, his muscles and tendons strained against them. There was no pain, no hum of impending electroshock. Just simple steel bands.

Their prosaism unnerved him. He could not place their use, and therefore, they were an unknown element he could not control.

The one circling his wrist had no give. Even if he broke the joint of his thumb, he wouldn't be able to squirm free. The band at his elbow couldn't slide over his forearm; the one around his bicep couldn't surpass the muscle. They were stuck in place until someone cut them off. 

At least there wasn't one around his neck. That would have been intolerable. 

His fear made him vulnerable. Replaying his memory, he considered what he knew to be unshakably true. Genji has gotten away. He needed to believe his brother was safe with all the certainty. Isolation would be the ruin of his mental state: he marked the path to firm ground, for when his captors warped his reality. 

_Genji was not here. Genji was not here. He could not be used against you._

Hanzo repeated the mantra until it was true. It had to be true. Anything else was an absolute failure, and Hanzo would not accept it. It was his reality as he established it. 

He found a black yukata and navy obi folded up near his head. He dawned the clothes and left by the shoji, stepping out onto the veranda. 

He had thought he was back on the Shimada estate in Hanamura. He recognized his mistake soon enough—he did not know where he was. 

“Cousin!” someone called. Hanzo did not respond until someone waved at him. A woman, Genji's age, dressed in a bright yellow kimono patterned in green bamboo and a katana thrust in her red obi, waved to him. She was further into the yard, a book, unopened, in her hand. She looked like she had been out for a stroll.

Or waiting for him. 

“I do not know you,” Hanzo said, flat and unfriendly. 

She smiled, calm, and in control. Her presumption irked. “I know. Father said that would be the case. I am Arakawa Suzu,” she introduced herself, bowing low. Hanzo did not return the gesture or the introduction. 

“Your father?” he asked. 

“Arakawa Isao. Come, he’s eager to see you.” 

Suzu moved. Hanzo did not. “I do not recognize the name Arakawa,” he reiterated. He knew everyone worth knowing in Japan. In Korea and China as well. 

Perhaps someone new trying to rise in the wake of his clan's collapse. The quickest way to do that was to kill those who stood above you. 

“Cousin,” Suzu appeased, looking over her shoulder at him. For the briefest of moments, for all it would take a bee to turn, he saw her temper. It bared itself in her arms and the bracing of her feet. In the look in her eyes before congeniality muffled them. She disliked his rudeness as much as he disliked her forwardness. At least they shared that in common. “What else do you have to occupy your time right now? Come—have your questions answered, and peace of mind granted.”

Hanzo felt nothing but mistrust and hesitation for this woman. A lifetime ago, this was the kind of person he thought to marry. She cut a traditional figure, her grooming a replica of his mother's from decades past. She projected a calm, steady presence, a consummate partner who could enforce decrees handed down by her lord and master. Her emotions--irritation; impatience; discomfort; his only detection was the slight tightening in the skin around her eyes.

She was the life he gave up with Genji's death. With a decade of exile. With his understanding with Jesse. 

He followed her because she was right—without weapons, directions, or even shoes, he had limited options. He needed information to escape. 

Arakawa Isao was a man of an older generation, with a headful of gray hair and hands masses of knotted scars from decades of weapons-work. A well-manicured beard still held some dark color, going white at the edges like a blurred photograph. An old injury ran down the side of his neck, just missing the vein. A kill shot, by any other name. 

He sat in the great room, at the head of the table. Hanzo’s father had once occupied such a spot. Once, Hanzo had, too. The place to the right was unoccupied and meant for him when Suzu took up a discreet place by the door that she closed. Dark, sharp eyes watched him. 

“Hanzo,” Arakawa greeted. He spoke with a deep, compelling voice that implied many things: that they were long friends; that he had every right to call Hanzo by his given name; that he was Hanzo’s superior. Hanzo instantly disliked him; the audacity astounded him. 

“Arakawa,” he responded, dredging every drop of his irritation into the name. 

“Come, nephew. There is no need for such formalities. Please, take a seat.” 

“You are mistaken. My uncles are dead.” He did not take a seat. 

Shimada Sujiro had two younger brothers. The first, Mitsue, had been a cruel and capricious bully; he pursued Hanzo after his defection. Hanzo had killed him in an alley in the inner depths of Shanghai outside a liquor store. The second, Kobe, had tried to helm the clan in Hanzo’s absence and had been wiped out by Genji and Blackwatch. 

“Your Shimada uncles are dead,” Arakawa agreed. “As I still draw breath, I assure you your maternal uncle lives on.” 

Hanzo froze; the worst tell of his surprise. His clan had worked so hard to excise the reaction from him with no avail, a decade of rust piled high on their enforced training. His throat spasmed as he struggled for something--anything--to combat man who claimed kinship with him. He slowly unclenched his hands so as not to damage his palms; relaxed his shoulders; demanded control back from his body. This man would not break him. 

“My mother’s family name was Nagabuchi," he countered. That had been what he was told, again and again. It was the name on her grave. She had come from a poor but prideful family, ancient but lacking any means to modernize. Her marriage gave her protection and salvaged a life in the rubble of her own relative's mistakes. 

Hanzo didn't remember when he learned this, only that he had known it since he was a child. His clan elders, his parents, no one had led him to believe differently. 

Arakawa had to be mistaken. 

“Ah,” Arakawa raised a hand. “ _My_ mother’s family name was Nagabuchi. Your mother was Arakawa Kaiya before she was Shimada Kaiya. Was it Sujiro who told you these lies? I always knew he was a spineless bastard.” 

Hanzo stiffened at the insult to his family’s honor. Even now, a decade after it should no longer matter, the presumption boiled his blood. 

“You have no right to speak so ill of my father.”

“I have every right—I told my family marrying Kaiya to Sujiro would result in nothing but loss. The Shimada clan thought themselves above familial respect.”

Hanzo thought back to the elders. He supposed Arakawa had a point. That didn't mean Hanzo would acknowledge his position. A new level of intolerability would be ruminating on his family's woes with a stranger who claimed to know him. 

“Cease, or I will demand satisfaction.” And he’d win it. Hanzo could see plain through his anger; Arakawa was slow and old. He would be nothing for Hanzo to rip apart. 

Arakawa stilled, sniffling his unseemly rage. Or perhaps sensing Hanzo’s. “My apologies. I do not mean to burden you with my outburst. I am merely upset chance to know you were taken from me under your father’s decisions. You are as much my clan as you are Shimada. So is little Genji.” 

No. Genji was not here. _Genji was not here._

“You preach familial connections, yet I approach my fortieth year before I learn of you. Some would consider you hypocritical,” Hanzo needled.

He saw a flash of the same temper Suzu had shown him. An arbitrary win that he could revel in all the way back to his cell. 

“You learn of me, yes. But not I of you. Who do you think had your bounty dismissed? Distasteful business, offering family work to outsiders. That took some time to sort out. You are familiar with yakuza politics; things either happen in hours or years. There is no middle ground.”

“You removed my bounty?”

“As I said: distasteful.” 

“And inconvenient for you.”

There was that temper again, a flash and a smothering of Arakawa's outrage at Hanzo's incivility. It did not matter: Hanzo was right. His bounty was gone because this man found Hanzo's exile inconvenient for him. It was not his familial duty, or affectionate concern, that prompted him — only efficiency and opportunity. 

Hanzo had spent his life pruning himself into an image of Arakawa. Of Sujiro. He knew where the roots found water.

“I had hoped to reach out to you when Sojiro passed," Arakawa side-stepped. "Without him, our clans could reconcile and start the family anew. However, circumstances upstaged my intentions.” 

When Hanzo killed Genji. When Genji joined Blackwatch and wiped the clan out. When Hanzo ran, drank, and fought his way across the globe. 

_Genji was not here._

“Circumstances,” Hanzo repeated, razors embedded in each syllable. 

Arakawa waved his tone away as if he were no more concerning than a child. “It is no matter; you are here now. And so well."

“Not for long. I will be leaving at my earliest convenience.” 

“I am afraid I cannot allow that to happen,” he said with a tilt of his head and ice in his voice. “It would be irresponsible, as head of my clan, to let a member of my family run as amok as you have. It is time someone took you to task, nephew. This galavanting about is unseemly.” 

Hanzo’s eyes flashed. “You have no such claim over me to order me so.” 

“I do, and no one will question me," Arakawa overrode. "Your childish whims have proven your incompetence; you are not fit to lead your clan. As a brother to your mother, your actions reflect on me. And your skills benefit me. The Shimada clan wasted and spoiled you: that will be corrected. Our clan has registered our claim on your and Genji; there were no objections from other clans. Our father always wanted dragons in the family.”

No. The mention of Genji was the final straw--Hanzo's fraying patience snapped. The arrogance and the brazen assumption stocked a deep rage within him. How dare this man claim any portion of Hanzo, let alone his brother. What did Arakawa know of them? 

Nothing; he only coveted. He saw no nephews, only tools. Yakuza clans had schemed for generations to obtain dragons and those who could command them. Hanzo would have no part in it. 

“Consider your claim on Genji and I rejected. I am leaving,” Hanzo demanded, rising. Suzu, quiet and unassuming in the corner, rose to her feet and blocked his path. She smiled apologetically at him as her hand lingered on her katana handle. She meant to stop him--he'd have to kill her as well if she did not yield. 

"Move," he snarled. "It is the only time I will warn you." 

“Come now, cousin. There is no need for violence. We are above such barbarism.” 

That’s how they get you, Jesse had warned him many nights ago. Jesse knew them better than Hanzo. They pet and they reward, and the moment they think you waiver, they brutalize you. 

Enough was enough. Weapons or no, supplies or no, shoes or no, Hanzo could no longer stay here. It was too much. Too overwhelming. Stifled and suffocating, he saw all the things he had fought so hard for in the last half-year slipping through his fingers if he did not run. 

It was time for extenuating circumstances; removed his sleeve, freeing the dragons into the night air. Stretching his soul down a familiar well of immensity and power they lent him without fail for years. The dragons cared not for clan disputes or personal honor; they wished to hunt and to kill. They longed to play in the world while residing comfortably above it. They rode Hanzo's body as a source for their pleasure and fulfilled his desires to further their existence. They would not refuse him his retribution. He called upon them. 

Their silence was his answer. He received nothing but silence. Not neglect, nor indifference--only a deep, deep silence. It was as if they were no more a part of him than the moon was part of the earth. 

Hanzo froze. Ugly, unpleasant shock ran through his instincts as the metal bands around his arm chilled with smothered intent. The dragons had heard him; something stopped them from answering. 

“How?” he whispered. 

“Oh good,” Arakawa cheered. Suzu’s smile turned smug. “Those do work. We weren't entirely sure--it was not many opportunities to product test. You see, nephew? You are already an asset to the family.” 

Hanzo moved, fast and dangerous and livid. He trained as an assassin and a dragon. He would not bow. He wrapped his hand around Arakawa’s throat, taking perverse pleasure in the man's startled expression. Arakawa knew nothing--Hanzo would kill him now, with or without a way out. Anything was better than being bound to a legacy he rejected once again. 

A sharp buzz and a heavy pressure hit his shoulder. Something punctured his skin. Hanzo tried to hold onto his victim's neck as his vision blurred, and his fingers felt numb. The last thing he saw before his sight blacked out was Arakawa’s condescending smile as he lost his grip. 

***

The photograph Hanzo sent him flashed over a screen. Scanning...scanning...scanning, reported Athena. She made a note of any relevant hits, but facial recognition databases were slow, cumbersome things spread out across multiple data wells. She could be at it for days.

Jesse didn't have days. 

Winston and Genji discussed options; plans of attack, potential ransom demands, overlapping patterns of behavior that could have triggered a grudge. Jesse listened to none of it. They did not ask him to leave; for all he offered nothing to the conversation. He stayed occupied with his phone; no new messages from Hanzo, photographs or otherwise. He read through their last conversation. So much unsaid, and he felt regret and worry nipping at his heels already. It was a sicken feeling, to consider that they had already had their last conversation.

Jesse put down his phone. That kind of talk did no one any favors. He refused to dignify it with any more of his attention. He got angry, instead.

He knew he should have investigated Hanzo's rescinded bounty. He kicked himself a right idiot for letting Hanzo have his way on that. Past stains never wholly washed away. Hanzo had been reluctant to pursue the issue, and intimate in his relief of burdens lifted. Jesse had caved. Thrice-damned fool that he was, he caved and let the matter drop. 

The computer pitched an alert. Jesse looked over and saw a name. 

"Who is Arakawa Hiroki?" 

"Arakawa?" Genji repeated, baffled. "Never heard of them." 

"A minor yakuza family," Winston prompted, running through criminal records. "Very minor. Known for small-scale weapons-running, mostly. A few forays into the narcotics trade." 

Genji snorted, disdainful. "Bottom-feeders," he muttered. 

"Didn't your family run weapons and drugs?" Jesse asked. 

"Yes, but we did other things, too," Genji growled, disgusted. "That's how a criminal empire works. You utilize multiple points of income that don't overlap with one another. Then you launder it through legitimate businesses — clean money for all your lifestyle needs. You don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Weapons and narcotics, humph.” 

Jesse let it go. The entertainment wasn't worth the argument. 

"A potential connection identified," Athena reported. Winston read over her findings. 

"Genji," he said. "Are you sure you've never met the Arakawas?"

"Yes. Why?" 

Winston turned the screen towards them. 

"What am I looking at?" Genji asked. 

"Your parents' marriage certificate." 

That was all the confirmation Jesse was after. He stood and left. Phone in hand, he opened his email. He did not bother running it through a proof-reader or encryption program. Fareeha would open it, or she wouldn't. He did not have time to delay.

 _Fareeha,_  
_Remember when you asked me to warn you if I ever did something stupid?_  
_Consider yourself warned._  
_I'll be in Japan. Winston has details._  
_Stay alive, sister, and wish me luck._  
_Jesse_

Already packed from Morocco, Jesse left within an hour, staying only long enough for Athena to download a dossier of the Arakawa clan to his phone. Genji eventually caught up with him. 

***

Hanzo bore no familial illusions: he was little more than a prisoner. His room—his cell—was monitored continuously by Arakawa clans members; Isao's children, Suzu, Tatsuo, or Hiroki. The twins, Itsumi and Sora, related to him by some marriage or other. Akifumi, Fumio, and Eriko; children of an aunt Hanzo had never met. 

He suspected there should be more, but he had killed a few of them on the train. More kin-killings added to his name. 

He ignored the overtures of camaraderie they offered. He did not respond to questions asked of him. He rejected food or drink presented to him. He would not participate in this farce. 

“Cousin,” Tatsuo scolded. It was the same tone his father used, dubbing Hanzo a disobedient, willful child. “This is just spiteful. There is no need to starve yourself on our account.” 

Tatsuo bore a nasty wound in his shoulder--Hanzo remembered inflecting it when he fired off a shot on the train. He took brutal satisfaction in every wince and flinch it caused his ill-deemed cousin. 

“I will gladly eat any food that I am allowed to prepare myself,” Hanzo replied. When that request was not acknowledged, he returned to his isolation. Tatsuo sighed but took no further steps to compel him to eat. They sat in silence. 

Denied stimulation, Hanzo ruminated on his conversation with Zenyatta, reliving it again and again. He was four times a fool for brushing off the omnic--his hubris and discomfort had come home to roost. Years had passed since he successfully found peace meditating, and he suddenly was in desperate need of peace. His body, hungry and angry, demanded he move, stretch, eat. After months in Jesse’s company, his libido was primed with frustration, an unfortunate consequence he had not managed in years. His wounds ached, wanting rest. His mind protested the enforced stagnation, seeking any entertainment — all things he refused to indulge in under the eye of his cousins. 

He needed not the calm of a moment, but that of a lifetime. 

_“Past experiences can often infiltrate and corrupt the process. Still, much like weapons-work and exercise, mental clarity can bring peace."_

_"I have peace enough."_

_"Peace in another is a beautiful thing. I believe we are less than whole without that. Do we not, then, owe it to those who give us peace to offer it in return?"_

_"To attempt peace with me would be to attempt the impossible."_

_"How so?"_

_"Emotions are not so easily dismissed."_

_"Emotions are a crucial aspect of life and living. Emotions also pass. Nothing lasts forever. You have no difficulty naming your emotions; would you allow them room to grow and mature? Their evolution could bring you relief from your pain."_

He clung to the omnic's brief lesson because contemplating his formal lessons would land him back in the meditation rooms of his childhood, with his father as instructor and Genji shifting by the second beside him. It was one thing to find himself trapped; it was another to surround his pain with stupidity and vulnerability. 

Through Zenyatta, Hanzo thought of Jesse. The freckles on his shoulder made an intricate pattern it took Hanzo the better part of an hour to sufficiently detail in his mind's eye. He recited the lyrics of Jesse's favorite Susie Luca songs a dozen times over. He recalled the sensation of Jesse's maroon and navy flannel, the smell and texture of the worn fabric that had long since found a home in Hanzo's wardrobe. His cigarillo smoke clung with persistence. Hanzo worked to identify the exact amount of sage Jesse preferred in his tobacco blends. Somewhere between .2-.3 grams, he was sure. Their distinctive smell played at the edge of his nostrils. 

"Masks the smell of cheap tabacco and keeps away the devil at the same time," Jesse had told him around the smoke one night. "Old community tradition." 

"You are the only person I would stand to smell it on, Hanzo had replied. In his defense, he had been halfway through a bottle of sake at the time.

"Damn, sugar. Don't you say the nicest things?" 

Hanzo grasped peace enough to mourn its loss when his jailers returned. Suzu this time, with Hiroki was at her side--he had been the one Hanzo had photographed on the train. Tatsuo rose to his feet. 

In Suzu's hand was a familiar syringe. 

“I want you to remember, you brought this on yourself,” she scolded as Tatsuo and Hiroki held Hanzo down. Her injection made Hanzo's world go watery and mellow. His concerns dampened.

He ate, at Suzu’s urging. Everything settled down into a dense, dimly-lit place. Why was he so worried about talking with them? 

"You shouldn't be, cousin. We're your family." 

Family. Clan politics. Clan protections. Hanzo desperately missed those. The dignity and the formality that governed his life. The age-old systems in place that solved the hassle of minute decisions, day in and day out. The rock-solid assurance that his clan would never release him into the cold world on his own. They would always be at his back. 

"That's right. Believe that Hanzo--we won't ever let you go." 

It was hard to grasp onto a thought. When Tatsuo asked him questions, and he responded before he could stop himself. 

“Who was the first person you killed?”

“A minor ministry official. He wanted to raise taxes on our land. Everyone agreed he was good practice." 

“How did you do it?”

“Strangled him on his way home. He always took the same route home. Sloppy.” 

"Who ordered it?" 

Something in Hanzo, something deep and muffled, ancient and well-established, slammed his mouth shut before his words came out. Something was telling him that was a bad idea. He mumbled his answers, slurring and obfuscating to quiet the terrifying grip something had on his heart. 

He was given some quiet after that. He laid down and slept, he was almost sure of it. When he awoke, he could not identify the time of day. It did not matter.

Food awaited him. He ate when prompted, and the sharp edges that had wormed into his vision disintegrated into wobbly uncertainly. 

He lost track of time. He lost track of himself. Hands touched him, confident and presumptuous. _fight them we are not weak_ something around his heart yelled while his hands rested uselessly at his sides. Something burned down his left arm. 

Hanzo could boast one singular moment of clarity, and only because Hiroki began asking questions too soon. He had barely finished drinking the tea given him when his cousin leaned in. He was the youngest of the three; he had a youthful impatience. 

The world was not sharper; it was merely less dull in that moment between doses. 

“Tell me about Genji’s dragon,” Hiroki demanded. A look of intense obsession lit his features. 

"You want the dragons," Hanzo whispered, in awe of himself for putting the pieces of that particular jigsaw together. 

"Who would not?" Hiroki whispered back, face twisted into a mask of grotesque mania. "No morals, no repercussions. Simple, unfiltered power. You and that freak brother of yours shame them with your cowardliness. Give them to us--let us put them to proper use." 

No! No, no, no. Not Genji. Genji was not here. Hanzo would not tell them about Genji. He would not break the one faithful vow he still held dear in his waste of a life. They wanted Genji as much as they wanted him. They wanted dragons. 

No, something staked inside of him. 

“Hanzo,” his cousin pushed, too far, too loud. Hands shook his shoulders. "Tell me about the dragons!" He was in Hanzo’s personal space. Hanzo could smell the incense from his morning prayers, and the sweat from his workout. Desperately, he latched onto any detail, fighting the drugs for as long as he could. 

It was not difficult to shift his internal mantra: Genji was not here, because he killed Genji. 

“Genji doesn’t have a dragon anymore. I cut it out of him.” 

“Field reports say a green dragon has appeared. Yours are blue.” 

“They are wrong. Or colorblind. The only Shimada dragons left are mine." 

Believe me, he silent ordered his cousin. Believe me and let it be, you idiot. Genji was gone. There was an absence of Genji in his life. Genji was no more. 

The past came roaring up on Hanzo, as inescapable as the tide. 

_"Hanzo! Hanzo, please listen to me--you don't need to do this!"_

_The crunch of his katana thrusting into Genji's flesh reverberated down Hanzo's hand. He recalled the vibrating sensation down the metal hilt into his palm._

Hanzo forced himself into the memory, the mantra, the monstrosity, and to believe. The world disintegrated into haziness, and he lost all sense of urgency. 

Genji was not here, because he killed Genji. Genji was dead, and so too was his dragon.

_"Hanzo, the elders are lying to you!"_

_"Silence, Genji. You brought this on yourself."_

Hanzo cried. The guilt was overwhelming--he no longer saw his cousins, the room, the food. The strength within him was gone. All he saw was Genji's bloody face as his little brother pleaded with him. 

It was the truth as Hanzo knew it. Ten years of suffering and horror, of disgust with himself at the actions of a night. It was like shrugging on old, dirty clothes. Distasteful, uncomfortable, and far, far too familiar in the way they clung and sagged against him. The shame and fear swarmed him, paralyzing any other action. Genji was dead, Genji was dead, Genji was dead. He repeated the mantra until he found it to be true. 

He floated. Hiroki probably asked him more questions; he couldn’t remember. 

Genji was not here, because Genji was dead.

_"Please, anjia, you're hurting me!"_

_He smashed Genji's head into the wall of the ally. Bone splintered with a sickening thud._

“He’s not, cousin. He was with you.” 

Hanzo wondered after Storm Bow. He could never again disgrace himself with a warrior's katana, but Storm Bow was his still. The last scrap of dignity he allowed himself. He wanted its curves under his fingers. 

"We saved it for you, cousin. Tell us about Genji, and I will show it to you." 

No, he didn't need to see Storm Bow that badly. Genji was not here, because he was dead. He did not want to see the body he riddled with holes and bled like a butchered pig. 

Hanzo floated in a fog-filled haze. Eventually, he picked out Suzu's face in the ceiling. 

"How are you feeling, cousin?" 

Genji was not here, because Genji was dead. Suzu’s eyes shifted. 

“He keeps repeating it, father. We cannot wring any other thought from him.”

“Then ask him different questions.”

Hanzo nearly sobbed in relief. Yes--ask him anything else. Please, please, please, let him stop reliving this memory. 

"Tell me about your first kiss, Hanzo." 

“You sound like Jesse,” he grumbled. The name slipped out—he could only protect one. 

“Who’s Jesse?” 

“My stupid cowboy. I miss him. Where is my phone? I wish to talk to him.” 

“Oh, cousin,” Suzu soothed. He heard her voice above him; high-pitched and all-encompassing. “Did you give your virtue to a cowboy?”

“He keeps it better than I ever did,” his loose tongue replied. Suzu laughed. He felt her hands on him, rubbing his shoulders, his neck, his hair. He tried to cringe away from her, but her hands followed him. 

“What’s his family name?” her voice urged him on through the fog. Thankful to be away from terrifying memories and family secrets, he grinned foolishly. 

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But he’s been going by Jesse McCree for as long as I have known him.” 

“Tell me about him.” 

"He is beautiful. Especially when he is distracted." Hanzo leaned into his cousin. "Do not tell him, but I stole his favorite shirt. I do not think he has noticed yet. He is forgetful like that sometimes."

“Charming. Here I believed you would never fall to anyone but another warrior.”

“He is a warrior! He can shoot anything.” 

“Anything?”

Hanzo hummed, happy to stroll through his memories of Jesse. They were pleasant, warm comforts that settled his aching brain and soothed his heart. He was giddy to talk about Jesse. 

Genji was not here, because he was dead. 

“Anything. He has the Deadeye, you know. I saw him use it in Jakarta last month. I have never seen such a weapon.” 

“What’s the Deadeye?”

*** 

An email awaited Jesse upon his arrival in Japan. 

_JM,_  
_You, brother, are a fucking idiot._  
_You should have waited for me._  
_Stay alive, or I'll kill you myself._  
_FA_

Jesse sent her the dossier he spent the flight memorizing. It was the best he could do by way of explanation. And the only apology he could offer. 

"You have a plan, right?" Genji asked. 

"Standard rescue op: located and extract. Athena highlighted some addressed I figured I'd start on; once I find Hanzo, infiltrate, nullify enemy threats, and get him out. Straightforward and uncomplicated. Less chance for things to go wrong." 

"Right. And when that fails?"

"If it fails, Winston knows where we are. I know you were talking to him on the flight. He and Fareeha will figure out something." 

"Reyes always said you had too much faith in people." 

"Reyes also said I was too cocky. Think he's happy being right? Let's stop by his grave after this and find out." 

"Jesse," Genji grabbed his arm. "We are walking into a trap--you have to know that. These people have surveillance in every transport hub from here to Tokyo What do you hope to accomplish here?" 

"I'm going to to find Hanzo. And we're going to leave. Stay or come with me, but decide quickly." 

Steam rose off Genji as he exhaled. "This is why no one likes working with you." 

"Probably," Jesse accepted.

Their argument was cut short. Instincts alerted Jesse as he turned a corner, and straight into a welcome party. 

A group of yakuza cut an intimidating shadow. Jesse performed a head-count: fifteen in their little group. He bet himself a dollar most of them had taken part in the attack on the train. They had the look of the young and the restless about them. Or at least, the young and the lean. Hungry bunch, looking to make their name on glory and blood. He recognized each and every one of them from the Deadlock gang, painting on personalities by stances and looks. Like shooting fish in a barrel.

Faced with overwhelming odds. Jesse changed plans. It wasn't even a difficult decision. He reached for a place he thought long forgotten, and prodded the energy he found there. It was deeper than Deadlock and Reyes and Blackwatch, deeper than Hanzo, deeper even than Susie Luca. He reached for that place, and sent out a prayer. 

**Help me kill them all.**

"Remember what I said about walking into a trap?" Genji hissed. 

"Genji!" A young woman in a bright orange kimono greeted, overenthusiastic and grating. She cut a promenant picture; the slash of color against a feel of black suits and expressionless faces. Cruelty lingered around the tiny upticks of her dimples. "We are thrilled to receive you, cousin." She eyed him from head to heel like she was comparing him to a personal schematic. "And you must be Jesse." 

Genji said nothing, stiff and angry and fuming. Should have left him on the plane. Jesse tipped his hat. 

"Come, we'll get you home directly. Father is excited to meet you." 

“And if we decline?” Jesse postulated. 

He didn’t see which hit him; he only get the fist driving into his stomach, forcing air from his chest and doubling him over. He braced knees, hacking and coughing up the lung that got dislodged. Genji yelled, his Japanese too fast for Jesse to follow. He didn't need to--the angry tone was enough. 

Orange kimono took over; scrambling for control of the situation as Genji spiraled. For the span of a heartbeat, chaos reigned as bodies moved without thought or instruction. Genji lunged in; yakuza swarmed. Jesse reached out and grabbed Genji's arm, pulling him back before all sanity was lost. His breath was harder to regain than he imagined. Must already be working. 

"It's fine," he gasped, mangling Genji's elbow in his grasp. "It's fine. I was asking for it. Let's just go."

"Jesse!" 

"Let's go," he ordered, louder. Genji grumbled as he relented. It wasn't as if they could fight their way out. When stuck in a hole, best to keep digging. 

"This!" one of the yakuza screamed. It took a moment to recognize Hiroki--he wasn't smirking, like he was in Hanzo's photograph. "This is why they do not deserve their power! Come now, sister, let us kill him now and take the dragon for ourselves. Father will understand!" 

Orange kimono slapped her brother. Genji cawed like the devil. Jesse thought about dragons as his head throbbed. 

"You want to challenge me for the dragon?" Genji snarled to his errant cousin. "Go ahead. I'll laugh as she eats you." 

"Be calm!" orange kimono ordered as Jesse ripped Genji further back. "Knock it off," he hissed. "We need to see Hanzo. Remember the mission, yeah? Get Hanzo out." 

"Yeah, I remember," Genji growled. "Hey! Where's my brother? I've had enough of this." 

"Come with us. We will take you to him." 

The house of clan Arakawa was traditional. That was all Jesse could say for it. He stopped seeing the details; his attention funneled down to essentials. They were greeted upon entry by name and relieved of their weapons. Jesse handed over Peacekeeper without a fight. The loss of his gun wasn't going to stop him. Genji glared as they disarmed him; his body screamed _I told you so!_

"This will be where you'll be staying, cousin," Hiroki pointed out, confident as a billygoat on a cliff. "Father will be thrilled to know you arrived. He has such plans for our family, you know." 

"When it comes time, you'll be the first one I kill," Genji replied, his Blackwatch self reemerging. His Arakawa cousin paled in anger. 

"Don't let Zenyatta hear you were talking like that," Jesse commented. He figured a distraction was the least he owed Genji. He didn't feel up to a fight in the hallway; he wasn't ready yet. His headache grew on the ride over, a tight band around his skull that pulsed with his heartbeat. It made concentration excruciating.

"Master Zenyatta knows I am a warrior. It was not the way of pacifism he taught me. Only acceptance." 

"That wasn't an invitation for you to start shit," Jesse warned Hiroki, who looked to be building up to another outburst. "Just get us to where we need to be, yeah?" 

Hiroki and orange kimono ushered them through the house into the great room. Arakawa Isao, recognizable from his profile on Jesse's phone, sat at a low dais before them. At his back, banners of calligraphy rose to support the room. Orange kimono bowed and left; Hiroki took up guard by the door. 

Stretched out beside him, with his head on Arakawa's knee, lay Hanzo. He was still, limp at Arakawa stroked his loose hair. He dressed in clothes Jesse didn't recognize, and barefoot. Subdued and tamed, his uncle all but crowed. 

“Nephew!” Arakawa greeted. His overly-confident demeanor put Jesse in foul footing. His head ached. “It’s so good to see you. I confess I was worried. Hanzo believed you were dead." 

“I lied. You'll be the first one I kill," Genji predicted. Jesse resisted the urge to look for Reyes or Moria. It was Blackwatch all over again. "Give me back my brother." Arakawa untangled his hand from Hanzo’s hair and waved it over his prone body. 

“I don’t see why you’re so emotional. Hanzo is right here, safe and sound. With his family, where he belongs. Come, do be civilized about this. Take a seat; I would love to speak with you. Both of you.” 

His hand returned to Hanzo, this time resting along his unprotected neck. The threat was clear. 

"Do that," Genji whispered. "And everyone here dies screaming. You think Hanzo did the Shimada clan damage--he merely escaped it. I broke it until it was a bloody, useless little thing too scared to come out from its burrow. Touch my brother again, and I will show you pain previously unimagined." 

Hiroki moved into Genji's space. Jesse shoved him away before things escalated. He got a slender knife pressed against his neck for his efforts. 

“Careful, Jesse,” Arakawa warned, rigidity creeping into his eyes. He ignored Genji's words; punishment through dismissal. Deadlock practiced something similar. “I have plans for you, after all.” 

“Oh, do you now?” 

Arakawa hummed in agreement. Jesse saw the shift happening--Genji was too volcanic. Arakawa considered him the reasonable target of the two. His mistake. “I had planned on offering Hanzo in marriage to some clans I hoped to bring into the fold, but he offers me you instead. Given your skills and abilities, I am willing to allow your liaison with my nephew to continue. With the understanding, of course, that you belong to me now as well.” 

Jesse blinked. He hadn't expected the invitation. He more so thought they'd try a hands-on version of the shovel talk if they knew who he was to Hanzo at all. 

"Genji," Jesse said. "You mind if I take this one?" 

With his faceplate down, it was impossible to tell what Genji was thinking. The tension at his shoulders was all the hint Jesse had to go on that he disapproved. Jesse would go as far as to say he greatly disapproved. He wanted blood and pain for the indignity of the Arakawas' treatment. For the assumption and the heavy-handedness. For the manipulation of a family Genji was working so hard to restore with Hanzo. Jesse didn't want Genji to muddle that work with blood and revenge. 

"I only ask," Jesse continued. "Because Hanzo wouldn't want you dealing with family matters any more than you had to. Don't put yourself out. I think I see the way of things, here. After all, what will happen if I refused such a generous offer?"

Arakawa's expression hardened. “Then, you die here. And, once my nephew has mourned you, I will proceed to offer him to others.” 

"Ah. Guess that makes my choice easier." He took a seat opposite Arakawa across the table. He did not want to be on his feet by the time he finished. It was a chilly night outside as the sun dropped below the western wall. Nothing like the New Mexico sun, Jesse recalled. That was the kind of heat that warmed the toes instantly and brought sweat to every pore within minutes. If he concentrated, he could feel it beating down on him. 

"You despicable coward," Genji seethed. He stayed standing. Jesse couldn't quite tell who he was addressing. 

He reached into his jacket. He took out a cigarillo and lit it, uncaring of Arakawa’s chastising stare. His awareness collapsed inward, circling the room like water down the drain. He lost the nightly bugs and birds, the rain over stone. He lost everything but the five souls in the room: Three dragons. Two enemies. One son of a vaquero with a hellva shot. 

“What’d you give him?” Jesse asked, waving a hand at Hanzo. 

“A mild sedative,” Arakawa assured. "He will be fine." 

“Mild sedatives don’t put a man down like that." 

“There is no danger. I cannot have my clansman hurting himself through thoughtless actions. It is for his own good. Once we have our contract worked out, we can wean him off his medication.”

“Because with me as a hostage, you think he ain’t gonna run. And if I didn’t agree, you kill me, and still had Genji to try this with again. Play them off each other, keep them in check because they'll be too scared to lose what little they have left if they defy you. Damn, I thought you sounded familiar.” 

Jesse side-eyed Genji. He could no longer make out the details in his cybernetic armor. Everything glowed green to his eyes. “You recognize him?” 

He could tell from the blank stare he got from the younger Shimada, his train of thought was lost. Jesse patted a metal knee in sympathy. It was probably for the best he did not recognize this kind of horror. 

“Genji’s trauma looks much different from my own,” Hanzo had once told him, during their late-night talks. “For him, it is a matter of control and freedom. Of individual choice. He wants the decisions in life, the comfort in flying free and well. He does not understand how guilt can get harnessed like a leash.” 

It was probably for the best that Genji did not see Reyes and his manipulation in his uncle. Jesse saw more than enough. He took a hit off his cigarillo. 

“Hanzo tell you about the Deadlock gang? About Blackwatch?” 

"He did indeed. You have led an interesting life, Jesse. All the better for it to have a proper use." 

“Yeah, thought so. Mild sedative, my ass. Anyway, I don’t talk much about that time of my life. Or the times after it, if I had my way. Brutal business, living. See the reason Hanzo and I work; he gets it. When you’re raised to think only the one truth—that you’re worthless without those who grant you freedom, you're liable to do anything to maintain your reality." 

Arakawa watched him closely. He did not understand why Jesse felt the need to talk. That was fine by Jesse, who was content to burn as much time as he could while his reality shifted into something different. His eyes itched, unpleasant and irritating. His mouth was bone-dry. He could feel the heat of the sun on his shoulder. 

"Hanzo gets it because it's what you people did to him. His clan had him believing the world only worked one way, and that he had to obey it--that it was his only way to survive. The Deadlock gang was my initiation. Them folks had me convinced that I would fail, succumb to the world around me, and die alone the moment I stepped outside their influence. They were _protecting_ me, you understand. The beatings, the starvation, the pain, those were all lessons they were trying to teach me. It was all my fault for not learning quick enough." 

Jesse exhaled, releasing smoke while he did. You weren't supposed to breath cigarillo air into the lungs, but sometimes he couldn't help himself. His hands wanted to shake. "Here's the real stupid bit: I fell for this shit twice. Reyes saved me. Pulled me hair-first out of the Deadlock gang, and gave me a new life. A better life, if he'd be believed. He had me so damn convinced for years that I was a worthless ingrate if I didn’t give my soul to Blackwatch. If I didn’t unquestioningly support him. If I didn’t live, breathe, and bleed for him. It took some years, but I got the right of it eventually. Because that leash only goes so far, and I had level-headed folks to point out to me when it grew taunt." 

He would forever owe Ana and Fareeha his life for that reality check. 

"Getting folks to understand is hard—brainwashing like that's hard to comprehend if you’ve never been on the receiving end of it all. What was so bad about it? It's not like they left bruises. It's not like they hurt you. Why not just tell them no? Why not assert yourself? Like it's the easiest thing in the world to cut a part of yourself out. To forget the debt, you think you owe. Imagine my surprise talking to Hanzo. Damn near knocked my boots off when I heard my fears out of his mouth. Shimada has him so convinced he was only deserving of one outcome. That all others were cut off from him, that he would only be accepted and protected if he followed orders.”

Arakawa was still as Jesse talked, seemingly content to let him tire himself out. Genji was damn near apoplectic, held in check only by circumstance. When Jesse finished, his cigarillo was smoked down to a stub. He ground it into the elegant low table, to see Arakawa's perfect facade twitch. 

"You will not do that again. You are done speaking," Arakawa ordered. Like Jesse would accept a censure demanding silence. 

“Ah, you're right. Listen to me, rambling on about nothing. And course there’s the Deadeye. Something tells me that caught your interest more than any concern for Hanzo’s well-being or happiness.”

“The Deadeye,” Arakawa repeated, avarice coloring his eye. "Hanzo mentioned it to us."

“Wanna know the secret behind it?” Jesse asked. He formed his hand into a gun, thumb up and index finger extended. Arakawa was in his sights.

“Thrill me.” Said the dead man. 

“I don’t need the gun,” Jesse whispered. 

Time slowed to the crawl of honey from the bottom of the glass. Intense, suffocating pressure, building since they stepped under this roof, since they Peacemaker took from him, screamed like a steam engine and released. He blew open doors and ripped through paper walls. Light fixtures flickered, dimmed, and shattered; pipes embedded in the earth wrenched themselves asunder. Wood splintered, support beams groaned with unbalanced weight. Stones flatted into discs, swallowing the weight of the world. Jesse's existence shuttered down into nothing--the thinnest bead of awareness oriented him to his target. 

Hanzo sang _Alice_ to him in the passenger seat of a pickup truck. _Hold me over 'til the break of day, Alice honey, that's all I wanted to say._

Once upon a time, he had shot the Deadeye without a gun. He had been seventeen and stupid. The trick had stopped Reyes dead in his tracks. Deadlock tattoos be damned, it had gotten the man's attention. 

“Do that again,” the leader of Blackwatch had demanded. 

“I don’t know how I did it the first time,” young Jesse had lied. 

Everything exploded, a detonation of energy and light and pressure. The matter of the universe, compacted into the space of his skin. He surrendered control of his body. His consciousness had only one goal; take the shot. 

Jesse took the shot. Arakawa’s head snapped back. The unmistakable crack of a gunshot rang out, ripping his eardrums apart and catching his heartbeat cold. A small trail of blood ran down Arakawa's face from the gaping wound in his forehead. Hanzo didn’t so much as twitch as his uncle's corpse slumped down over him. 

Reality set in quick, harsh, and boiling. Jesse’s hands slammed into the ground; his body was quickly giving out. Blood rushed from his nose; tears ran unrelentingly from his burning eyes. Unfriendly footsteps raced towards them.

“Genji,” he gasped. The younger Shimada was already on his feet. The shock was not enough to keep him still. He grabbed the katana thrust into Arakawa’s obi. 

“I’ll take care of it,” he said. A green aura built itself around him, vivid enough to cut the fog seeping into Jesse's vision. He thought he could hear snarling. “You’d better believe we’re talking about what just happened later.” 

Jesse laughed as he shook, breathless. The pain kicked in; every joint screamed like he'd torn it apart. The simple expansion of his lungs was agony. Jesse grabbed at Hanzo's arm; his grip strength was gone. He pulled the love of his life from the grasp of death and fell back into the tatami mats.

"The other one?" Hiroki had been behind them. Jesse remembered him from Hanzo's photograph. 

"Dealt with," Genji reported after a long moment. That was a Blackwatch phrase--don't ask questions, everything has been dealt with. Jesse shook his head with little-mustered energy. 

"Dead?" 

"Very dead. I need to secure the house and call the others. Will you be safe here?" 

Hanzo: heavily sedated. Jesse: on the verge of cardiac arrest. 

"We'll be fine," Jesse puffed. "Go." 

Genji went. His dragon sang as he unsheathed Arakawa's katana. 

Jesse concentrated on his breathing, battling for each lungful until movement stirred him. Since it wasn't him moving, there were only so many options. 

“Hey darlin,” he greeted, kissing the bridge of Hanzo's nose. He threatened to get a piercing there a week ago, and Jesse was desperately holding out hope for it to be true. 

_Whoa, boy_. Greeting his man was asking too much of his shredded body. The room spun into a blur as color leached out of the room. Grayscale pitching towards black; his mind struggled to track anything as simple as a touch. His lips were cracked dry from the desert heat. His hands were blistered and scolding. Dehydration sucked the energy from his body; he was sweating through his clothes. Pitch black fell so far it became bright white. Above him, the sun demanded recognition. In a white, cloudless sky, she was dire and relenting, unmercifully divine. Come hell or high water, and she would be the last thing he saw. 

Jesse was so, so tired. 

Hanzo shuffled under him, one eye focusing like a great beast newly aroused, promising death and destruction for the impertinence of being bothered. 

“Jesse?”

“That’s me, sweetheart,” he gasped. His heart was trying to decide if it should beat out his chest or give up the ghost and stop already. He couldn't see Hanzo. He'd have to be content with his voice, deep and rough — a river defying the baking sun. 

Gravity dragged Jesse down until he collapsed atop Hanzo; both of them shattered and reclaimed by their pasts.


	3. gotta get up out of here, and you ain't leaving me behind

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Jesse remembers why he doesn’t shoot the Deadeye blind. Hanzo starts shit. Cosmic entities get it on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm finally home and back in front of a computer. Consequently, this chapter got longer.

“Stop,” Dr. Ziegler ordered when Hanzo yet again prodded the IV needle set in his vein.

“This is unnecessary,” he groused. He did not volunteer for medical—it was a decision taken from him the moment they touched down in Gibraltar. His recovery restriction, from the IV to the mandated rest to the forty-eight-hour monitoring, reinforced his wounds and his recuperation. With no outlet to work through the fear of abandonment and terror, of helplessness and uselessness, of his ordeal, he slowly went feral. His weakness did not ease him; it angered him. He could not afford to be useless.

“Until your bloodwork comes back, and we know exactly what you were given and the side effects of it, you will leave that needle exactly where it is,” Dr. Ziegler imposed.

Hanzo conceded with ill-grace, least forty-eight hours turn into seventy-two. His initial dislike of Dr. Ziegler stemmed from her actions with Genji’s body. She was quickly sinking further in his regard with each issued order.

Sojiro once commented that Hanzo’s ability to hold a grudge bordered on intolerable. Hanzo had taken that as a compliment.

They would ask the Arakawas about the drugs in his system, but Jesse and Genji had left scarce few of them as viable sources of information. No one could explain what Jesse had done or how his targets went down. Arakawa had not been the only gunshot victim, but he had been the quickest. The rest had injuries reminiscent of standing too close to a blast zone; Hiroki had borne a gut-shot before Genji ended his suffering, and the corpses of a pair of guards stationed by the door were littered with gaping shrapnel wounds.

Jesse lost consciousness on the floor of the Arakawa great room and had not returned to awareness since. Genji had walked away with only superficial scrapes. His brother stayed tight-lipped about what he had witnessed, reserving the details for his field report. In fact, Genji had been avoiding Hanzo since they returned to Gibraltar, staying in medical only long enough to assure Dr. Ziegler of his integrity.

To salvage an untenable situation, Hanzo claimed a chair beside Jesse’s bed and refused to move. He hoped for a short vigil; for Jesse to regain consciousness and slip away from medical with him. He read Genji’s report a dozen times over, looking for hints. From everything he knew: his observations, training runs, discussions with Jesse, the Deadeye did not act as an energy enhancer. It honed Jesse’s abilities, filtered through a physical weapon. It should not have done what it had done.

“I was unaware Jesse could use the Deadeye in such a way,” he said when Winston and Dr. Ziegler came by for their daily check-in. Grudge or no, if they had information that would revive Jesse, Hanzo would adapt to their presence.

Dr. Zeigler, long-used to keeping secrets, simply shrugged. Winston proved to be a more useful well. “Reyes reportedly saw Jesse perform it with the Deadlock gang. There’s a notation of it way back in his files. Blackwatch tried to replicate it without success.”

Hanzo recognized a habit in between the lines of Winston’s analysis. His own two dragons held the potential to inflect untold damage if presented with the right scenario. Taming them both was a rare feat, and the elders probed for years into the boundaries of his power. It took him no time at all to understand that their limit was one best left unexplored. The full weight of power he could bring to bear held the potential to level cities. Well, that he could once bring to bear.

Hanzo had not spoken to his dragons since their return to Gibraltar, either. The bands Arakawa placed on him, on them, were gone. The loss did not restore their connection; another untold consequence of his abduction, another answer he could not wring from the Arakawa clan. For the first time, his tattoos were just that and little more. The enforced, discomforted silence echoed through his skull as phantom threats. His worst fear played out in repetition: he called to them, and they would not answer. The loss of their presence shook any assurance of himself he cared to possess. Having been so effectively cut off from them, he knew a cost was required to re-establish their connection. The first time he summoned them, ( _"Seventeen and stupid," Jesse said with an easy grin_ ) had been excruciating enough; a relentless vigil of fasting, praying, and meditation to bring himself to a place he could summon a power so ancient it predated civilization itself.

Without knowing how Arakawa severed the connection, Hanzo could not restore it. He saw that only as a product of hindsight. While leaving Japan, the bands had come off curtesy of Genji, who mechanically crushed layers of steel, circuitry, and symbol work between cybernetic fingertips. In a battle of contrasting Shimada willpower, the remnants were turned over to Overwatch for further investigation.

“Let me study them,” Winston had all but pleaded over the comms link when they were described to him. “We can find out how they blocked your power and create defenses for you.”

Hanzo had been not about to let that happen. “Nothing but an excuse for him to discover information about the dragons,” he argued, fierce and angry and defensive and scared all at once. Not only for himself; Jesse had been unresponsive since the compound. A limp body in a sea of limp bodies. Hanzo had not yet begun calming himself from the adrenaline and reaction his instincts demanded.

“This is an example of your rampant paranoia,” Genji shot back. He kept the remnants of the bands out of Hanzo’s reach. “Take a moment and remember yourself.”

“What does Overwatch hope to find? A way to harness the dragons that even our clan couldn’t manage? No—they do not need this!”

“Hanzo!” He stilled at Genji's stern voice. His brother had reached a state of peace easier than he amid their family drama; Zenyatta had flashed through Hanzo’s thoughts. “These things cut your connection to the dragons. That shouldn’t be possible. You’re scared, and you don’t understand. Don’t react like the elders did when they were confronted similarly. Learn and grow.”

Hanzo’s nose had flared; his skin had flushed; his heartbeat had skyrocketed. “You presume to lecture me?”

“You chucked me out a moving train,” Genji snapped. “I get to lecture!”

“That was to save you.”

“And damned yourself in the process! Look where that got us. I’m offering to return your gift of salvation, without the cost of myself. If we learn, we can defend and protect ourselves. If our positions were reversed, you would insist."

Hanzo had collapsed, surrendering the fight for the damned technology. Genji’s strict control had beaten back his objections. If his brother had sounded petulant, or arrogant, as he so often had been, once upon a time, Hanzo would have fought to the bitter end for the bands’ destruction. Instead, Genji was rational and reasonable. A reminder of how far the sparrow had flown from the nest.

“You don’t have to find such glee in this,” Hanzo had grumbled.

“I’m rarely on this side of the scolding. It’s a new and exciting experience,” Genji had replied, tucking the bands away. He had delivered them to Winston immediately upon their arrival. Then, he had disappeared.

Perhaps, not as rational and calm as Hanzo suspected.

Hanzo would check in on Winston’s progress once Jesse woke up and he was assured of his improving health. Genji was right, as loathed as Hanzo was to admit it: tuning himself to the particular blend of ritual and technology the Arakawas had utilized would map out a solution. Then, once he fully comprehended the landscape he was embroiled in, he could summon back his dragons. Better than doing it the old-fashion way again. 

***

Jesse still had not woken up. Three days, and not so much as a peep, a twitch, a brain wave spike. Hanzo monitored his vitals obsessively, keen for any change or hint at progress. He was losing track of himself and his surroundings. He could not recall his last meal, or when he had limbered his body. His perception of time took on two shifts: with Jesse, or without. The time Hanzo spent without was shrinking daily.

He slept in Jesse’s room when he slept at all. The padded bench by the window was make-do for naps that lasted long enough to take the nasty, floating, nauseous edge off his exhaustion. Never enough to dismiss it entirely, only pacify it for another few hours. He worked through his pain; he didn’t want Jesse to wake up alone. Leaving was inconceivable. Once Jesse was awake, he would eat a banquet and sleep for a week knowing they were safe. 

At dawn on the fourth day, a woman arrived. Hanzo awoke at the sound of the door opening; his sense primed from the attack and not yet confident enough in his safety to stand down. She was younger and appeared unarmed. She sat in Hanzo’s chair, politely averting her eyes as he shrugged on a fresh(ish) set of clothes. 

“Hanzo?” she asked.

He nodded. “Fareeha?”

She nodded. Hanzo pointed to Jesse’s sleeping face. “He’s a fucking idiot.”

“I’ve been saying that for years,” she agreed.

“Do you know what’s happening to him?”

“No. I wish I did. Any changes?”

“None. According to his vitals and brain chemistry, he’s asleep. Nothing we have tried has woken him up.”

Fareeha wandered her tattooed eye up and down Jesse. Then, she turned it on Hanzo: down and up. “Jesse’s told me a little about you.”

“Good or bad?”

“Good. Had it been bad, you and I would've met a lot sooner than this.”

“Then please do not find offense when I say I hoped to meet you later.”

“Yes—much later. Preferably never, if we both had our way. When was the last time you ate?”

“Three days.”

“And slept—honestly, slept, for longer than an hour?”

“Three days.”

“Consider yourself relieved, Shimada. I’ll keep the watch.”

Hanzo stood up—his limbs complained bitterly in the simple act of straightening his spine.

“You’ll stay until I return?” he confirmed.

“Of course,” Fareeha agreed. “Go; get a good meal and some sleep. Maybe take a shower.”

Hanzo touched Fareeha on the shoulder and left the hospital wing. He did not turn left towards the dormitories. He did not do any of the things Fareeha suggested. Relieved by someone he trusted to watch over Jesse, Hanzo had other plans for his morning. The dawn’s sun wavered in the sky, golden red and hazy. As good a place as any; Hanzo took a seat in the dirt. He closed his eyes.

In through the nose, out through the mouth. Examine your breathing as air passes through the lungs. Acknowledge the chest as it expands and contracts. Notice how the earth feels under you, and your connection to that earth. Let your limbs relax. Focus your energy on your feet. Be aware of your soles, your toes, your ankles. Move up and study the joints of your knees. The muscle in your thighs. Find the center in your navel, ground yourself in that spot. Consider your stomach, your torso, your chest. Listen to your heartbeat. Follow the line of your collarbone from your throat to your shoulder. Acknowledge your elbows, your forearms, your wrists, your fingers. Count the joints that defend and protect you. Return to your throat, focus your energy into action. Lift, find your jaw, your tongue, your nose. Feel the air moving in and out of your body. This brings you life. Think of your eyes, your ears, the top of your head. You are here.

Hanzo opened his eyes. The sun was higher in the sky, blue-golden and bright.

He went to the shooting range because sacrifice could only happen on holy ground. He unloaded Storm Bow from its case, reverent and precious. He gathered as many arrows as he could find. He did not put on his bracer.

Staring down the cement-sealed range, a single light showed him the target. He concentrated on that, and nothing else. Hanzo had sat vigil at Jesse’s bedside for three days. He had fasted during those days. Meditation came easy in enforced solitude, and a determination not to go crazy in the stillness of the man Hanzo hung his heart onto without reservation or reluctance.

Hanzo fired off a shot: the arrow struck the bullseye: the bowstring hit his forearm. Blood rushed into the welt. He ignored the pain and reloaded.

He shot, again and again. He shot until his arm screamed, and his hands cramped. His mind and heart were captured, bound down, and torn open in exalted postulation; it was only the matter of harassing his body until it too gave way to the coming tide. Sacrifice for his wish: in food, in sleep, in blood, in mind, in heart. Without thought to the pain, the injury, the burden those sacrifices grew from. Hanzo touched each of them with a devotion born of needing and wanting.

Hanzo loaded another arrow; movements rout as his body fell into a pattern. Long remembered and excellently primed. Expand, breath, aim, hold, release. The arrow did not move; the bowstring did not stick.

_"come back to me."_

Ritual and sacrifice. This time when Hanzo called, the dragons came. They screamed down the path of the arrow, jerking wood and steel and fletched feathers through the air. The material arrow exploded under the enormity of their presence, unable to sustain as a vessel for them. Unthinking, running on instinct and love and tangled compulsion, Hanzo thrust his arm out, Storm Bow and flesh, and offered them a home. They accepted in a roaring embrace that left Hanzo bowed over and gasping, elated to be home. 

He was no longer himself. He was multi, many-layered and faceted through the prism into a thousand shades of light. He was home, flesh and physicality made sacred. Six eyes sited his target; three arms pulled back on Storm bow; three heartbeats lived inside his chest.

_"you are ours as we dwell within you."_

Hanzo released the arrow. It flew true, roosting in the bosom of his target. He set down Storm Bow on the way to his knees, gasping and shaking with the force of the completed ritual. A valiant effort was struck as his elbows locked and he braced himself on his hands and knee, coughing and wheezing. He would not faint; he would not prove inadequate. Not now, when he needed strength the most. Slow, fighting for every inch, he sat back, falling into seiza posture. Course-correcting himself. 

Blue light flooded his vision, eliminating all else. Serpentine bodies climbed space, wove together, and calmed his mind in their hypnotic pattern. In and out. Through, under, over. With him once again, where they belonged. He had mastered the dragons once, and he would do so again.

Hanzo looked up and saw divinity. The dragons as entities acknowledged by consciousness were old. They predated the yakuza, the Sengoku Jidai, and the Imperial House of Yamato, and reportedly even the Yayoi jin. If Shimada gossip was right, the family once governed hundreds of dragons within the clan. When Hanzo claimed his pair, the clan clung to five. There had been hope that Genji would claim more than one. When he didn’t, the loose two faded from family records. Then they had been wiped out. Only three dragons existed in the world, and he sat before two. He was ashamed that memory, and time, had dulled their presence in his mind. Kneeling before them, he was supplicant, filled with the awe, righteousness, and defiance they rightly deserved. 

Hanzo worked words into his wishes and desires. Cautiousness and clarity were needed; not impulsive reactions. For all he saw them as ancient, his dragons were relatively young in the grand scheme of ethereal life. Genji’s dragon had a thousand years on them, at least. They were sometimes overeager to please, and excited to explore, untampered by caution. If he allowed himself the flaw of thoughtlessness, he would ruin them.

For their youth, they were energetic, determined to tie themselves together in relentless knots. Impetuous and mischievous. They had come to Hanzo decades ago with a deal—both, or none. He had no choice, in the end. He would never turn them away. 

_"what do you desire."_

_"take me to him."_

The dragons’ maws opened; Hanzo braced himself as they swallowed him whole.

***

Fareeha looked up when she heard the slamming of urgency entering her proximity. Genji threw himself into the room.

“Where the fuck is my brother?”

“What?” she asked as blue light exploded through the window.

***

Hanzo stood alone in a desert, unbearable heat and a cutting wind combining to make the experience thoroughly unpleasant. His eyes forced themselves shut against the glare of sunlight reflected in every direction. It was an excruciating, slow process to regain his sight in increments. 

He was alone—a good a time as any to consider his direction. The rocky, red-dusted sand was littered with sharp gravel, wind-shaped boulders, and sun-baked plants brown from exposure. Plateaus and mesas spotted the distant horizon. No roads; no buildings; no Jesse. Not even a nice set of clouds to offer a shady respite. It was untrammeled nature, shaped by the elements and the earth alone. 

He had his clothes, though he was weaponless. He felt in good health—the lingering effects of his drug-induced state, his exhaustion, his starvation, the bloody welts on his arm, all dissipated in the space of a moment. His hair and clothes were clean; he had a canteen filled with water and a handful of ration bars in the places typically occupied by his weapons. He pulled back his sleeve for final confirmation. 

The bare skin of his left arm was whole and unmarked; the dragons were gone. Fear and uncertainty flooded through him one again. He scratched at his arm with a fingernail, frantic for a clue, or a reason for their abandonment. 

_why._

There was silence to his query. Not the kind Arakawa forced upon Hanzo; not a muffled screaming behind an enforced gag. A connection ravaged and depressed into nothing. Their new silence was calmer, more indulgent, more exploratory. A guardian waiting patiently in the wings while their charge faced the challenge. Ready to swoop in if needed, but not inclined to lend a hand at the first sign of trouble. 

It was unnerving to the implication of a nudge without the physical touch to justify it. Hanzo reigned in his frantic urgency, assured by their mindful presence as they disappeared from his skin. 

“Alright, then,” he acknowledged, rubbed at his jaw. His bread was neat and trimmed—not something he had time for in the last week and a half of chaos. 

Hanzo followed the sun because no other feature offered him direction. Occasionally he yelled for Jesse; he received no reply. 

The town came upon him in strangling hints. A water tower, a fence, a run-down tracker. It was a surprise to suddenly be confronted by a town. Well, he came across a collection of empty buildings. The only structure with any activity sat at the center of the cluster, a run-down salon with a tin roof, wooden walls, and blacked-out windows. It didn’t have a name. Hanzo stepped inside. 

The salon was full, insomuch as Hanzo would define the activity. The patrons were curled around tables, playing cards or drinking. All things typical of the setting. Their faces were wrong. Which was to say—they had none. Instead, the patrons' features were a compilation of smudges and light. There was no discernible detail in their clothes. The cards they played with were blank—the labels on the bottles they drank from a splash of geometric spaces. Hanzo moved in and out of their personal space since not a one of them seemed to care.

“Jesse!” he called. He heard his voice echo off the roof, around the music. None of the patrons so much as glanced at them. 

Hanzo hopped the bar. Secrets, he learned long ago, were usually stashed in the same place as money and weapons. It was good practice to look in similar positions for them. The bar was dense oak wood and room-stealing, the kind that was built into the room with no hope of ever being removed. It would go down with the walls and the roof. Like the beer bottles, the liquor labels had no readable language. Hanzo reached for one with clear liquid and a familiar bottle shape and took a sip. It tasted like cheap whiskey.

The barest hint of an exhale; somewhere around his knees; someone was below him. Controlled adrenaline coursed through his veins as he jerked and looked down. A gangly body curled itself up on the shelf under the bar. Apparent, definable features detailed a face that had eyes clamped shut a mouth working on a wordless prayer. 

It was a young face. Unlined, covered in a light dusting of peach fuzz. Beanpole limbs that looked uncomfortable and uncoordinated. Battered flannel clothes, and second-hand cowboy boots. All recognizable, even three decades removed. 

“Jesse?” Hanzo asked, touching the young man’s shoulder. Scrawny bones jerked under his hand; honey-golden eyes blinked at him. His breath hissed through his teeth. 

“Who the fuck are you?” he whispered. 

Hanzo paused, momentarily thrown. “A friend. My name is Hanzo. I have been looking for you.” 

“I don’t have friends like you, and you don’t belong here,” young Jesse dismissed, all teenage pride and bravado. 

When Genji had gone through this stage, Hanzo had responded horribly, trying to force Genji’s personality into a preferable mold and detonating their relationship as he knew it. Let it never be said he could not learn from his mistakes. There would be no success in demands or orders. He did not try to force Jesse from his hiding space. Rather, he toed over a wooden crate, transforming it into a low seat and putting himself at eye level with Jesse.

“I am here to help you. You are lost. I was concerned.”

“I ain’t anything that you gotta concern yourself with. Just go. You’re not supposed to be here.”

“Who is supposed to be here, if not me? Are you waiting for the Deadlock gang?” 

Young Jesse hesitated. “How did you?” 

“I told you I am a friend. You confided in me, once upon a time.”

"They…they won’t come here, often. This ain’t their place.” He didn’t sound sure. 

Hanzo glanced around—the room looked different, lower to the ground. More looming, but also more precise. Angled low, the bottle labels almost made sense. He could pick out a defined letter or two, in recognizable fonts. This was the point of view the memory of this place was built upon. “What place is this, then?”

“My da’s. It’s his favorite bar. If we ever got separated in town, I was supposed to come here and wait for him.”

Hanzo straightened to look around. He saw no one who could boost a resemblance to Jesse. “If you are waiting, why are you hiding?”

 **Boom!** The fixtures rattled in their mounts. The bottles fell and cracked. Jesse’s youthful face crumbled, the stubborn set of his mouth quivered. He whimpered and curled back into his hiding space. Hanzo ran a soothing hand down the side of his shaggy head and over his thin shoulder, wanting more than anything to ease Jesse’s worry and fear. Then Hanzo rose to his feet.

The figure in the middle of the room was a person, he supposed. Perhaps, once upon a time. With some generosity toward what was considered a body, with limbs, a head, a torso. No more, not in this Now, it was a grotesque mash of connections. Once wiry and angry, once obese and booming. Eyes: red, yellow, green, blue, brown, flashed in sets of two and four and six. Too many noses, too few ears. This was not a person—this was an amalgamation of many, forced by circumstance into one. It roared in the tone of a dozen voices. The only feature that did not change was the belt-buckle. The Deadlock skull and padlock. As the waist and substance changed—straight, bulging, curvaceous, lean, battered, clean, brass, silver, gold, leather, chain, rope— the design stayed constant. 

“Brat! _maggotgoodfornothingworthlessrunt_ Get over here!” the entity thrashed. “No time to waste on your bullshit! _thingstodoplacestorob_ Fuck knows no one else is gonna coming for your idiot ass _givehimasmackgethimgoingquick_ ,"

Hanzo moved to circle the bar until Jesse’s hand shot out and grabbed the fabric of his yakata. He did not have the leverage to pull Hanzo back, but the act of him trying broke Hanzo's heart and reenforced his rage. 

“Don’t,” Jesse whispered. “They’ll hurt you. They always win." Hanzo reached down and with gentle fingers untangled Jesse from his clothes. 

“Wait here. I will be right back,” he said. He did not allow his fury to seep out where Jesse could see it. That was a useless practice and would serve them no purpose beyond upsetting Jesse further. Hanzo had other plans, rapidly forming. Jesse was wounded and could not defend himself from the demons of his past. Against his similarly-constructed demons, Hanzo was woefully inadequate and painfully useless; his mistakes haunted him in ways he could not combat with his paltry defenses of sanity or absolution. He had run from them nonstop for a decade before Genji inspired him to kick-start his path to redemption. Against Jesse’s demons, and Hanzo shifted unto a terror unleashed.

“Thief _intruder_ unwanted _leave_ get the fuck out!” 

“Leave,” Hanzo commanded, using the voice that was meant to mercilessly rule a yakuza clan. Righteous fury strengthened his spine. A call for violence danced down his fingers. “You do not belong here.” 

The entity lashed out, fury and wrath exploding into a pair of fists. Malicious energy washed over him, distorting the salon walls and patrons even further. Nothing appeared sane or real anymore. Closer to the entity, the air was doused with gasoline and despair. All it needed was the match to set the whole place up in flames. It wanted Hanzo to be the match—wanted to sink the ugly responsibility of proving them right onto him. 

Unadulterated expression—pure and burning—anger, righteousness, pain, physicality—dragged Hanzo into the fight. He struck low, aiming to break joints and shatter knees. He wanted blood in retribution for his fear and panic, fermented by three days in a chilly hospital ward. He wanted screams in payment for his worry. He wanted revenge on something that he could hurt. 

His rage made him sloppy, leaving himself open. Brass-covered knuckles dusted his jaw. Hanzo reeled, tasting blood in his mouth. His senes rattled around in his skull, his anger cut short by practically and battle-trained level-headedness. The shifting entity rose, unbroken. Hissing filled Hanzo’s ears, insults and violence converging into wordless threats. 

Logic grabbed his unbounded emotions and shook them—hard. A new belief, fully-formed and glass-sharp, took prominence: it ate at the edges of his meditations as he sat vigil. Violence, his body colliding with danger sans the dragons, his bow, or his peace of mind, struck clarity true. 

_"Your childish whims have proven your incompetence; you are not fit to lead your clan,” Arakawa accused. "The Shimada clan wasted and spoiled you: that will be corrected.”_

Hanzo had thought the Arakawa had meant Hanzo’s actions; his shame and his abandonment. He probably had—the man had been arrogant, not insightful. Yet, pushing against a malignant demon brought together by the scars of Jesse’s traumas, the violence of his life written so deeply into his subconscious they haunted every layer of his psyche, Hanzo reconsidered his condemnation from a new angle. He had been eager to break this thing into a whimpering, bloody mess. To take out his fear and rage and protectiveness on a deserving target. 

It was not his cowardliness that spoiled Hanzo; it was his violence. A too-simple solution for the complexity presented to him. 

This entity was not real—it was a projection of Jesse. And as such, Hanzo felt no security to destroy it. No guarantee destroying it would make it leave. He possessed the skill to break this threat over his knee like a twig. He did not. Instead, he became a barrier. He sacrificed a blow into his flank to get inside their reach. As shifting as the nebulous body was, Hanzo contacted with flesh when his shoulder struck solid muscle. He found a liver, a kidney, a solar plexus. Nonlethal and painful. He heaved, steeling ground as the threat stumbled back. 

“Scum! _howdareyoudefyme_ Get back here!” 

Hanzo battled on relentlessly. He stabbed at pressure points, bruised delicate ligaments and rattled nerve endings. He did not try for distance, his typical preferred fighting ground. This was a demon who would eat every inch granted. The figure scrambled their fingers, five, ten, a dozen, a hundred, down his arms and chest, searching for a hold on him. A way to leech their vile intents into him. Any avenue to urge him to hurt those closest to him for their own good, so they would understand that the world was brutal and unforgiving. Did he not understand? They were doing this for his own good. He had to learn to survive. His survival would benefit them. 

Hanzo resisted their grasp, denying them their wish to sink into him, inexorably driven forward, forward, forward. They did not belong in this space. They would not be allowed to pick Jesse apart. Not again. The swinging doors of the salon were no barrier at all. He shoved, leaving no room for argument or retention. 

The entity disappeared into the blank space of the desert, squandered into the wind like dead glass and smoke. He regained his awareness, his surroundings, he concern. The salon lost the iridescent shine of a house on fire, the patrons’ ambient voices flooding into the sudden silence. The rattling, shuffling, natural-to-the-setting activity picked up uninterrupted. The light returned to the bingy yellow of unattended, neglected lightbulbs. 

“Jesse?” he called, keeping his voice even as he took deep, rejuvenating breaths to calm his heart and blood. “You can come out now.” 

A shaggy head peeked over the edge of the bar. “Did you kill them?”

“No—I did not need to go that far. I merely made them leave.”

Jesse's eyes rose higher over the bar to impart their disbelief. Hanzo was not surprised; he was bewildered by his actions as well, in a fuzzy sort of way. Once upon a time, he would not have hesitated for the kill shot. The relief of seeing Jesse look at him in admiration, and not horror, was enough to solidify his moral dilemma. 

“Will they come back?” he asked. 

“They always come back,” Jesse said. He stared at Hanzo with the uncomfortable awe of the young. 

“Then we will leave. Do you want to go anywhere in particular?” Hanzo asked. 

“I don’t know anywhere else but here.” 

“Alright,” Hanzo acknowledged. “Then we continue as we have.” Ushering the young man in front of him, they left the one-lane town. They followed the sun. Hanzo let Jesse pick their direction whenever the opportunity arose. The town faded into the distance, and the desert opened wide. Eventually, they came across a canyon cut into the sand, wide and deep. 

The cabin was tucked into the canyon's rising slope, protected from the elements and well in control of the high ground. As they climbed up to it, the sightline stretched for miles. While wood comprised parts of the cabin's construction, so too did steel and brick and stone. The door was high-grade security. Young Jesse fumbled with the keypad and its eighteen digit access code, and the door opened. 

“What is this place?” Hanzo asked. 

“…I don’t know.” Jesse admitted. He looked shaken and exhausted. His face was pale, his eyes wide. “I don’t know how I know the code on the door, but I do. My name and my parents' anniversary.”

Hanzo did a quick count. “'Jesse McCree' and a date only take up seventeen spaces.” 

Jesse froze; his face locked up. “Uh yeah. I—ah,” he flustered. His hand clenched and unclenched. His cheeks turned red, and his eyes shifted to anywhere but Hanzo’s face. 

It was adorable. Hanzo very deliberately did not smile as he put Jesse out of his misery. “I do not need to know your real name. Jesse was the one you gave me, and the one you want me to use. I only point it out, so you know not to mention it next time.” 

Jesse slumped, muttering. It was like a kitten dropping any pretense of pride or grace in the face of sleepiness. 

“You should get some rest,” Hanzo encouraged, pointing the way to a bed through the curtain door off the main room. “I will see to the watch. You will be better when you wake.” 

Jesse hesitated, glancing around the room again. Then he yawned. “Alright, alright. I’m gonna get some shut-eye,” he said as he shuffled off to the bed. His boots, spurs and all, clattered over the wooden floor. His hat, battered, sun-bleached, and not the one Hanzo recognized, was tossed to hang on the wall in a thoughtless movement transitioned across the years. His Jesse did the same thing, the same way. A learned habit that survived since youth. 

It made his heart ache. He wanted his Jesse back. The one who could walk into an enemy yakuza camp and lay waste to his enemies. The one who sang along to his music, and cooked fantastic eggs, and kept Hanzo entertained during stake-out missions.The one who made shitty coffee when he was annoyed and an excellent cup of tea when it was Hanzo’s turn. 

Hanzo listened until he heard light snoring. Then he went about familiarizing himself with the cabin. He did not know how long they would be here. He discovered plenty of MREs stashed neatly in the pantry, though the labels were once again a garbled mess of black ink in an indiscernible font. A high-grade security system with cameras and sensors set up for a two-mile perimeter. A panic room below their feet. A discreet, emergency exit Hanzo suspected led down into the canyon. Clean water came from the faucets and drained with no issue. 

Away from young Jesse, who wore his emotions unfiltered over his face, Hanzo let his confident crack, overwhelmed. He had not known what to expect when he had presented his demand to the dragons; he had been desperate for a way to bring Jesse back. That had been the end of his logic. He did not fully understand the endless desert stretching out in every direction, or the rules that adhered it. He had found Jesse—that alone counted as a victory. With no hint on what was happening around him, or what the place he should aim to arrive at, he only had his instinct to guide him. 

Hanzo was sure they were somewhere in Jesse’s memories. Not a logical display of space and time, but the mashing of memories together, as they were reflected in Jesse’s mind. Hanzo was not going to leave him to struggle against his demons alone, no matter the minor hangups of enforced reality. 

The fireplace had a gas log-lighter, but no firewood. Hanzo located the ax and went in search of a source. He was not sure if the copse of juniper trees situated behind the cabin existed in the real world, but the bark splintered under the ax blade all the same. He picked out standing deadwood that looked seasoned enough, and picked his mark, and readied his ax.   
  
He worked methodically. The sky got darker—the sun was setting. The wind howled down the desert canyon. 

_Pinche idiota!_

The voice carried, hissing around the rocks, climbing the walls of the canyon. Hanzo stilled, turning his head, listening. Crawling chills clawed up his spine, and set his teeth on edge. The voice was faint, and it was menacing, stringing up his instincts and rattling them, like a bone-deep puncture. Something was out there. 

It was no longer safe in the wilderness. Hanzo hurried with his bounty back to the cabin, latching a dozen locks behind him. He checked the security cameras and saw nothing. It did not ease his nerves. 

Hanzo knelt and built up the fire. The log-lighter ignited the juniper wood instantly and kept the fire going without babying. He had also found sage shrubs growing in the roots of the juniper, and had harvested a handful. He tossed a sprig in with the juniper happily being consumed. 

“Well, hello gorgeous,” Jesse said, low and mean. Hanzo spun and stood. 

Jesse leaned against the door jam of the bedroom. Older—but still not right. This one wore dark, economical clothes, a belt buckle with a winged skull, and a black hat. No serape in sight. Both his hands were whole. He watched Hanzo with a distinct blend of amiable lust and shaded defensiveness, ready to shift into action either way if Hanzo offered him a good enough reason to do so. 

“Good evening,” Hanzo greeted, reigning in his expression to keep his shock at Jesse’s transformation to himself. “Did you sleep well?”

“I sure hope I did,” Jesse replied, eyes taking a tour up and down Hanzo with blatant interest. “Shame I don’t remember a moment of it. Wanna help me out with that?"

“My name is Hanzo. You brought me here.” 

“No, I didn’t. I don’t bring anyone here.” 

“The passcode is your name—your real name—and your parents’ anniversary. You are a Blackwatch agent serving under Commander Reyes in exchange for a commutation of your prison sentence from crimes related to the Deadlock gang. They have a bounty on you…a substantial amount." The Blackwatch part was a guess, but an educated one. The clues were there, and the age would be right. No older than twenty-five, if Hanzo was to bet. Jesse had shown him the bounty the Deadlock Gang offered for his head on the Blackboard, with over two decades of maturation and inflation edging the amount higher each year. Not the same number as this Jesse would know it. 

Still so young. The lines in his face flashed with his features but had not settled yet. Jesse straightened, from relaxed to alert. The playfulness fell away. His movements were crisp but carried none of the confidence or comfort of his later years; only grim, efficient necessity. He stared at Hanzo like he was contemplating how fast he could cross the room to kill him. 

“If you want to spar, Jesse McCree, I am more than willing to accommodate you. However, that’s not why I am here.” 

“Then, why?” 

“You did something to protect me. I am returning the favor.” Hanzo did not want to admit the rest. He did not know how this Jesse would respond to their relationship. If he rejected it, Hanzo would be hurt, as being rejected by any version of Jesse would hurt, but he would cope with minimal fuss. It was not as if the situation was typical. He could hardly hold Jesse accountable for his subconscious scrambling for equilibrium. Hanzo's greater fear was that Jesse as he was now trying to engage in their physical relationship. The idea of intimacy with a version of Jesse he did not know, who did not know him, deeply unsettled Hanzo. Putting aside the morality of bedding someone who did not remember him, it was an emotional landmine he had no intention of detonating. This Jesse, he suspected, would not think to ask after Hanzo's limits; or acknowledge his own. Would not understand the vulnerability of Hanzo melting into him, or would allow Hanzo to see his vulnerability in turn. Would not embrace the loving torture of falling together. 

His dilemma had been simple, with young Jesse. He had looked at Hanzo with nothing more than curious admiration. This one, he suspected, he would be stepping more carefully around. 

“I needed to get you somewhere safe,” Hanzo said. “Someone was after you, and we worried they would come back.” Close enough to the truth. Much like young Jesse, Blackwatch Jesse didn’t seem to recognize the world was fragmented and patchwork—the memory of a place not seen for years. There was no indication he understood his situation, with the Deadeye, the coma, and the mental prison he was locked in. Hanzo picked his words carefully, unsure of the consequences of revealing the full extent of Jesse’s situation. 

“So I brought you to my safe-house? That doesn’t sound like me.” 

“Your safe-house?” That would explain the location. And the door. And the high-end security system. 

“Hmm,” Jesse hummed affirmative, pride in his eye. He had calmed when Hanzo did nothing to escalate the situation. Trusted, for now. “Not an ounce of Blackwatch in this baby. All money laundered clean through the local casino and materials sourced from the underground markets. Military-grade security, reinforced doors, and widows. Artesian well for water, bio-degradable septic, natural gas fixtures, and an industrial-strength eco-electric generator. And stocked with enough MREs to last until judgment day.”

“And here I was sold on the excellent sightlines and the sharp ax,” Hanzo said. He nodded towards the fireplace. “You may have central heating, but I was of a more traditional mind.” 

“Can’t say I disagree. Smells nice. So you think you got me nice and secure?” 

“Secure enough,” Hanzo replied, thinking of the voice he heard in the wind. He had the worst feeling they were outrunning something. 

“Then how’s about you come on over, and I thank you like a proper knight in shining armor, yeah?” 

Step carefully. “I was thinking about dinner. It has been some time since either of us ate. Are you hungry?” 

Jesse eyed him like he didn’t quite believe Hanzo’s delicate refusal. “I don’t mind, you know. Certainly wouldn’t be a hardship for me, sugartits.” 

Hanzo rolled his eyes. “That just killed any chance you thought you had. Sugartits—where do you come up with these?” 

Jesse grinned; for a moment, it overtook his entire face and rang with such familiarity that Hanzo had to turn away and occupy himself with the fire. They ate on the floor, splitting an MRE that Jesse picked out—shredded BBQ beef, as Hanzo discovered once they dug in. Not delectable, but filling as only an MRE could manage. They consumed maybe half the pack, talking amicably about nothing. Once Hanzo had firmly diverted Jesse’s lobbed invitations and showed no sign of pursuing any of his own, Jesse shimmered down into someone with a civilized (if abrupt) personality. If Hanzo listened well enough, he could hear his Jesse’s sense of humor, his keen forethought, beginning to shine through. 

_You lazy shit!_

Jesse stiffened, his joviality falling away to reveal naked tension. A wild look came to his eye—he knew who called. 

“Is _that_ who you’ve been protecting me from? Oh, sweetcheeks, there’s ain't nothing that’s gonna keep him away from me.” 

_Ingrate! Where are you?_ yelled the voice, deep and wrathful as it screamed through the canyon. 

“Who is that?” he asked. 

“Ain’t none of your business if you don’t know,” Blackwatch Jesse snapped. He rose to his feet, dumping their meal garbage in the sink. 

_Fucking worthless—can’t even follow simple orders! Get back to base!_

“I’m coming, sir!” Jesse yelled. “Hold your damn horses!” 

“Jesse,” Hanzo pleaded. “Don’t go out there.” 

“Sorry, doll-face, I gotta go. I’m not in the habit of running, especially with him yelling.” 

“Do not call me that.”

“Got one you like better?” 

“Darling implies a level of respectability.” 

“Darlin', huh? You and I’ll have to circle back around to that later. Maybe.” Uncertainty filtered over Jesse’s face. All the age-sharpened weariness dropped way, leaving a nervous young man who twisted Hanzo’s heart in ugly ways. “You can wait here, if—if you want. He might let me off the hook for dereliction without too much yelling if I go now.” His shoulders hunched. “I mean, maybe.” 

“He won’t —he never will. Do not go out there.” Hanzo did not want to restrain Jesse. He very much did not. Jesse hated being restrained—that had been the focus one of their frequent nightly discussions, right alongside Hanzo’s dislike of role-playing and degrading name-calling. But if ever he was tempted... 

“I gotta,” Jesse weakly argued. 

“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. Will you come here?” Hanzo asked. He made sure he asked. 

Jesse wavered, staring at Hanzo like a lifeline even as he inched toward the door. Outside, the wind howled. Hanzo held out his hands; palms up, open and inviting. He did not know how else to compel Blackwatch Jesse, who owed him nothing and the voice everything. Except..he could offer his understanding. Because he knew whose voice slammed against the door.

“You have an obligation, and nothing I say will change that; I understand. You owe him so much, how could you conceive of abandoning him? It is not that you want to go to him: what you want, I think, is to stay here and rest. But he has you pinned. The unwavering love and loyalty he has cultivated in you will always pull you back, no matter how deeply you unroot him. He is the foundation of the world as you know it. People who defy him are not rebellious or brave. They are idiotic.” Hanzo could not help but think of Genji, who had once upon a time screamed all this and more at Hanzo. Not that he had listened. “They do not comprehend that you owe everything to them. You give those pieces of yourself away, bartered so they will protect and shelter you, and perhaps, in the right circumstances, love you. And it is always in danger of being taken away if you do not give them what they want. The world is cruel and terrifying and heartless. You were offered shelter from that, so you owe them everything. How else will you ever survive? You surely cannot do it on your own, after all. You are nothing, without them—without him. Sound familiar, Jesse?”

Jesse stared at him, breathless. “I can’t just,” he trailed off, pained.

“Yes, you can. I understand,” Hanzo said, soft and compelling—because he did. And it hurt: like an unspeakable weight against his soul, it hurt. “I understand why you think you need to go to him. I once owed myself to people like him as well. But, speaking as one who fought to be rid of that pain and that guilt, I promise you. You do not owe him anything. Please, come sit down.” 

Jesse sat, eyes wide and shaking to his bones. Hanzo clasped his hands between his own and refused to let go. His throat was raw, his emotions a scattered mess. It had hurt, to dig those words out and speak them plain. It left him jarred, unsteady. The voice outside screamed. It burned his frazzled nerves. 

“Tell me what you smell?” Hanzo asked, scrambling for something else to focus on. 

“Why?” 

“Because I want to know.” And he needed a moment to collect and center himself. He could not curl around Jesse and remind himself of better times, as he did in the real world when he felt like this. He had to be unaffected, calm. This Jesse, who was at the height of his obligation and burden, needed calm to get through the night. They did not have time for Hanzo to fall apart under the voices of dead clan elders. 

Jesse inhaled. The voice rattled the windows. When his hands spasmed, Hanzo rubbed at the joint where Jesse's thumb met his palm. He already had the familiar calluses of Peacemaker embedded in his skin. 

“Juniper smoke—did you cut the wood?” 

“I did.” 

“It’s from the cluster in the back. It’s why I choose to build here and not further into the canyon; better resources. And…sage? Did you put sage in the fire?" 

“I did. You pack it into your cigarillos. It reminds me of you.” 

“I haven’t done that in years.” 

“I never minded it. When did you start smoking?”

“Sixteen. Gave it up three years ago.” 

He kept his hands clasped around Jesse’s, massaging the joints and knuckles in practiced confidence. An experienced archer knew the anatomy of a hand, the areas of sensitivity and tension, like a prayer. He asked questions, urging Jesse to talk. Outside, the voice raged in a storm of whirlwind and lightning, thundering along the sky, encompassing the earth. Drilling itself into the core of the world, and refashioning reality around it. It did not find them—Blackwatch did not know of this place. 

They stayed in the living room floor through the night. Hanzo only ever let his grip go to throw more wood onto the fire. They talked because to be silent was to concede to the storm. When Jesse nodded off, exhaustion overtaken expectations, Hanzo realigned them both. He pulled Jesse against him and reclined. A buffalo-skinned rug padded the wooden floor, and after a bit of stretching, he grasped a colorful woven pillow from a nearby chair. He rested against it as Jesse curled into his chest. Hanzo kept watch until he saw sunlight in the dawn. 

Hanzo did not sleep, though not for lack of trying. His mind drifted, and he toed the edge of unconsciousness, but his mind could not complete the function. He suspected it had something to do with this place—it was not his mind, and therefore, he had no respite. Jesse slept enough for them both. When he felt his energy rally, Hanzo pressed a kiss to Jesse's forehead and bundled him a blanket on the buffalo-fur rug, warm and safe and in no danger of disappearing. He rose and stretched out his spine. 

A quick ransack through the bedroom produced a change of clothes. Anything to make him feel refreshed. Hanzo rinsed off and cleaned up in the small bathroom. He dressed in a clean white henley and a pair of loose black linen pants from the bottom of a drawer. 

The sunrise was a kaleidoscope of rust red, gold, and twilight blue through the window. No hint of the storm recently passed. He stepped outside and enjoyed the morning air. It was crisp, wet with morning melt from the mountain chill. The sun and the full moon occupied the same space in the sky, dulling for influence. The last dregs of twilight clung to the horizon. If Hanzo concentrated, he thought he could pick out Saturn and Jupiter, triangulated around the North Star. 

A low swing bench was mounted on the cabin's porch. Hanzo was positive; it had not been there earlier. Jesse and his memories. He sat at it and watched the sun relentlessly vanquish the moon and the straggling stars. The clouds celebrated success. 

The thick steel door of the cabin opened, and Jesse stepped into the daylight. Hanzo’s heart constricted. 

Jesse—older yet. No longer in his Blackwatch clothes, thank every deity and ancestor listening. This one had a mechanical arm. He wore a pair of comfortable, hole-ridden jeans, and his gray Susie Luca shirt. The same shirt that was currently folded up in Hanzo’s dresser back in Gibraltar. The same shirt he wore the last time they had sex before Hanzo left for Japan.

Hanzo had a lot of memories tied up in that shirt. Seeing it on Jesse, form-fitting and well-loved, brought many of them to the forefront of Hanzo’s mind in a full rush. The bottom dropped out of his stomach, and he scrambled to catch it before it jolted the rest of him along with it. This was not the young Jesse, who he worried over and protected. This was not the Blackwatch Jesse, angry and reckless and suffering. This was a Jesse he recognized, but one that was not yet his. Not yet. Still too young; perhaps right after he escaped Reyes and Blackwatch. Recovering and looking for redemption. Scrambling for his senses, Hanzo wondered how he was going to deal with this Jesse.

“You look comfortable in my clothes,” Jesse said. His voice was neutral, his eyes searching. 

“I am,” Hanzo replied, clinging to bland to hide flustered.

“Mighty rude of me, seeing as you look as comfy as a quail, but I gotta ask: you sure you belong here?” 

“I do.” 

“I only ask, because I don’t know you. Makes me think you’re in the wrong place.” 

“I am Hanzo; you are Jesse. I was in trouble. You helped me, and brought me here.” True enough, as long as they did not fuss too much over pronouns and timelines. Hanzo wondered how many new ways he was going to find to tell their story to Jesse. This one he designed to appeal to Jesse’s righteous heart and his need to protect. 

“Oh, darlin',” Jesse leaned against the cabin wall, looking at Hanzo with fresh concern. “You in a bit of trouble?” 

“Yes. Do you wish me to go?”

“I ain’t in the habit of leaving beautiful strangers in need of help stranded in the desert.” 

Neither was Hanzo. “Would it surprise you to know we had a very similar conversation last night?” 

“Did we, now?” Jesse asked, eyes alight. Curious and coy. Cautious and concerned. Everything in one. Older, and wise, this Jesse. Hanzo’s heart broke. He was so close, _so damn close_ to his Jesse, who talked and cuddled and loved like it was nothing for him to offer Hanzo his heart. Not quite yet, apparently. Hanzo still had to fight and protect this man, because they were not yet done. 

“We discussed expectations and trauma. The Deadlock gang and yakuza families. Then you fell asleep on my chest.” 

Jesse glanced down. “Looks like a nice chest to fall asleep on. Shame I don’t remember it.” 

“Such a shame. You should sit. I will make tea.” 

Jesse sat. He was always so damn trusting. Or at least, so damn curious. “Don’t think I have any tea.”

Jesse should not have clothes that fit Hanzo in the bottom of his dresser. The MREs should have hit their expiration date long ago. There should be dust on every surface of the spotless cabin. Hanzo was willing to bet there would be tea in the pantry. 

He found a small container of loose-leaf tea, an electric kettle, and a ceramic steeping pot. He set the coffee to brew and waited for his tea. It was nearly possible to convince himself they were safe—that everything was real and set to rights. That it was another morning, just like any other. 

That illusion shattered when he stepped outside. Close, but no cigar, as Jesse liked to say. He regarded Hanzo not with acceptance and trust but with inquisitive stillness. He did not reach out to touch Hanzo, nor smile at him like he was the sun to Jesse’s sky. He did not laugh. Hanzo steeled himself with a sip of too-hot tea. 

“How long ago did you leave Blackwatch?” he asked. They did not sit side-by-side on the swinging bench; Hanzo claimed a spot on the porch’s railing, establishing distance and safe ground. This Jesse fell sometime in the years between Overwatch’s demise and the Recall, he was sure. Where in those intervening years, was the question. 

Jesse arched an eyebrow. Hanzo bribed him with the cup of coffee he brought along—cream, no sugar. “Left Blackwatch over a year ago. Why do you care? Trying to get dirt on an old op? Because I’ll tell you, I’m no well of information.”

“My interest in Blackwatch is only in that I am glad you left. And that you brought me here. You told me last night that this place is not connected to Blackwatch, and you worked hard to guarantee that disassociation.”

“That I did.” 

Jesse produced a cigarillo and lit it from a matchbook, alternating vices back and forth. Sage and tobacco punched Hanzo in the gut. 

“When did you start smoking again?” 

“I never quit,” Jesse replied, his expression shaded behind the smoke curling up his face. He did this, Hanzo knew. Muddled little details about his past with lies and obfuscations. Half-truths and careful edits. 

“I am going to ask you again tomorrow,” Hanzo said. “I hope you tell me the truth.” 

“I’ll tell you if you tell me: what’s after you?” 

_You._ “I do not know, quite yet. We are better staying here. I do not believe the threat can find us.” 

"Well, since you don’t wanna tell me the truth, and I ain’t gonna tell you the truth, we’ll have to think of something else to do, darlin'.”

“Like what?”

Jesse handed him a side-ways glance, filled with invitation and suggestion. He leaned forward, eliminating the distance between them. “Up to picking up where we left off? Wouldn’t break my heart in the slightest, seeing as I don’t remember the good stuff. What’d you say?” 

Hanzo had walked right into it; step carefully, he scolded himself. Just because this Jesse was calmer, smoother, mellower than the last one did not mean the danger to Hanzo’s sanity and good intentions were gone. It was harder to say no to this Jesse if he were honest. Comfortable, kind, and intimate in ways he did not even recognize struck cords in Hanzo. The familiar way he held his cigarillo, or ran his finger over the rim of his coffee cup, or kept one eye on the sunrise; all the ways Hanzo had studied him in their mornings together lit in him a simmering desire and adoration. Unable to resist, he let his fingers tug playfully at Jesse’s just-too-long hair. Linger around the edge of his wonderful jawline. Stealing the cigarillo, he took a hit off the tobacco. Smoke filled his skull. 

“Ask me tomorrow,” Hanzo ordered. _Please, dragons let it only be until tomorrow,_ he prayed. There were only so many versions of Jesse he could encounter before his own came. Tomorrow, he prayed, would herald the Jesse who looked at him with recognition and trust. With love. 

Jesse grinned. Hanzo nearly fell out of his clothes right then and there, restraint and morality be damned. 

***

Everything was awash with green light as Genji summoned his dragon on the lawn of the Gibraltar base. Fareeha sat cross-legged beside him, munching on a bag of mixed dried fruit. Too much sugar, but so good. She didn’t know what to expect from a dragon and made an effort to be unassuming in the face of the majesty and awe the great beast exuded. The one time a giant emerald eye rolled over her, her blood froze. Her eye itched. Her heart skipped a beat. 

Genji spoke a word, and the dragon disappeared, sinking into his skin. The green lining around his cybernetics reignited with inner vim. 

“Wow,” she muttered, suitably impressed. 

“Exactly,” he replied, collapsing onto the grass beside her.

“And your brother has two dragons?” she reiterated, toying with a dried apricot. 

“Yes. Mine is older, wiser. She’s also stronger if we're honest. Though, never say that around anija. His pair are more proactive. More…” 

“Useful?” she offered, smiling when Genji glared at her. 

“No! Just, more willing to indulge requests. The elders used to say his pair were juveniles—they like to show off. Hanzo never approved of that. It made them sound smaller than they are. He prefers to label them ‘mischievous'.” 

She hummed and dug out a dried mango slice. “Will one of them move onto Jesse? Now that they’re pair-bonded?” 

“Pair-bonded—really?”

“It sounds better than ‘joined at the hip like teenagers.’ And I think both of them would agree they’re too old and too contrary for ‘dating’ or ‘boyfriends’.” 

“Yeah, no. It doesn’t work like that. The dragons are Hanzo’s like the Deadeye is Jesse’s.” 

“Alright. Did she tell you anything?”

“Be patient.” 

“That’s it? Be patient? Does that mean we just wait and hope that Hanzo comes back? That Jesse comes out of his coma?”

Genji shrugged. “I’m not sure what else we can do. She said Hanzo is safe enough and being watched over. She was a little cagey on what exactly that meant, but she seemed to be under the impression he would return. Eventually. And whatever he did, he was doing for Jesse—that much I whole-heartedly believe. I think she confirmed Hanzo was going to get him.”

“You think?” 

“She’s inscrutable.” 

“So, he’ll be back. Eventually.” 

“Time works differently for her. For all of them. They’ve lived thousands of years in the span of a moment. It makes it difficult for her to know when things will happen.” 

“And there’s nothing we can do?” 

“Keep watching over Jesse, I guess. It’s what Hanzo told you to do, right?” 

“It’s what I offered to do.” Fareeha held out her bag of fruit. Genji, to her surprise, selected a couple of dried kiwis. They weren’t her favorite—too flavorless, too weird a texture. She decided to foist the rest of them, mixed into the bag like tiny green stink bombs, onto him during their time together. And boy did they have time if the glowing green dragon was to be believed. 

She bit down hard on a dried cherry. Fucking ridiculous. Trust Jesse to get himself mixed up in some sort of weird, magic cult constructed around mythical dragons and ninjas. When her mother had made her promise to look out for his dumb ass, she hadn’t expected to deal with powers beyond their kith and kin. “Hanzo called Jesse a fucking idiot,” she recalled. 

“That sounds about right.” 

“It's dawning on me that Hanzo bears some justification to that title as well.” 

“Damn right he does,” Genji replied, shoving a kiwi slice in his mouth. 

***

Jesse was asleep again, stretched out on the buffalo-fur rug with his hat over his forehead. It was barely midday. By Hanzo’s calculations, he had slept as often as not. He hoped it was a by-product of their circumstances, and not a symptom of something worse. He swallowed down the anxiety and unsettlement of it all; with any luck, the next time he awoke, he would be the version of Jesse Hanzo sought. With that accomplished, they could turn towards waking him up. 

He had no idea how long they had been here, not really. Was a day in Jesse’s mind-desert the equivalent of a day in the waking world?

The security system chirped an alarm. Jesse did not so much as twitch when Hanzo checked the feed.

North: clear. The canyon stretched up to the camera screen. 

East: clear. There was a river Hanzo suspected linked to Jesse’s well water. 

West: Hanzo squinted at the screen. The scrub that protected the camera was undisturbed, but something in the background was unsettling. The background clouds looked hazy. The sunlight bled, like cheap dye out of cloth. 

South: And there it was. Where the landscape should be, fractured destruction. Like someone had taken white out to the world; erasure at its finest, with deleted aspects creating holes in a hardy fabric, the rents and tears nearly as bad as the absence of matter. 

Hanzo reached down and shook Jesse’s shoulder. His breathing continued to rise and fall slowly. He did not awaken. 

“Why do you do this to me?” Hanzo asked, removing Jesse’s hat and setting it aside. He kissed Jesse’s forehead like he did last night. 

He stepped outside. He oriented himself with what was left of the sun. He turned south. 

The void awaited—that was all. No light, no sound, no movement. Still as the morning, and twice as intense. He did not see it grow—he did not have to see it. His awareness of the void reestablished every few seconds; larger, and larger, and larger. There was no escaping a threat that consumed so expectedly. 

Hanzo planted himself before it, toes dancing with the edge of an abyss. He would not allow this to eat him or Jesse; he had fought too hard to get to this point to give way for nothingness. A great beast challenged for the territory, the shapeless, colorless entity rose to meet him. Hanzo was rushed by a sourceless wind, blowing his skin hot and his bones cold, setting an ache in his teeth and blinding him. 

“What?” Hanzo demanded, fighting for his senses. “Do you think, since his demons cannot ruin him, you will simply eat the ground away? Destroy the board so that no one wins?”

The void roared; it vibrated Hanzo’s bones. Sheer, unrestrained power stood before him. The kind that no longer bothered with the physical, resting firmly in the unknown space of thought and perception. This was not the first time Hanzo had encountered such a force. When he knelt, sacrificed, and performed a ritual near as old as time, the dragons existed in a similarly broken moment, transcendent above the boundaries of accepted knowledge. 

It was, however, the first time Hanzo stood before such an entity with no authority to tame or control. No tools, or rituals, or passed down understand to guide the way. This was not his dragons, whose curiosity made them indulgent. This was something much, much different, and it trailed burning shocks down his mind, leaving oily, iridescent rings in its wake. It attacked again, breaking through Hanzo’s defenses like they were paper walls set to stop a cannon. 

“No!” Hanzo yelled, scrambling to stay upright. “No further!” 

The void pulsed, bowling him over. It did not spit words at him; it did not need to speak. Unfiltered emotions poured into him. Adrenaline, short-stop panic, rage, helplessness, pride, guilt, shame, fear; Hanzo was so inundated by them he could no longer identify anything but the relentless slog of depression dragging him into a hole from which there was no escape. He could no longer tell what his mind produced, and what was being force-fed into him. 

A colorful explosion of gas and dust detonated from the void. A red skull stared took shape, rising above Hanzo, blocking the sun, the clouds, the sky, the canyon, the ground. All his eye saw was red. 

Hanzo cracked, flinching back from the red skull, the black void, the sunny desert air. He strangled the sob in his throat and threw himself backward. Unincorporated blank space rushed to meet him. He was pulled forward, a force stronger than gravity reeling him downward. 

The color burst behind his eyelids: Genji lay at his feet broken and bleeding, his crying growing faint. Hanzo’s sword, slick and warm, hummed in his hand, demanding he finish. A dozen eyes peered down the back of his neck, wondering how far he would go for duty. He had no heart; only numbing ice. This was all he had ever wanted, once upon a time. 

**Wow, killer. Brutal one, aren’t you? Think I can get you there again?** an undefined voice spoke directly into his skull. He felt something deep and ancient take hold, slipping into his mind as easily as Hanzo breathed. It transplanted silly misconceptions like affection or redemption. Or defiance. Unprompted, his memories and emotions were rustled through, as if flipped by on an index. Young Genji laughing at the cherry blossoms. Hanzo’s first archery lesson. His first fight with Jesse. His first night with Jesse. The invader rifled through them all at will. 

Hanzo struggled for an exit, to find a light, a weapon, a barrier, anything. He thrashed as he was dunked into the darkness for his defiance, a steady weight dragging him along like a fish on a line. Until, abruptly and with uncomfortable ease, the reins were taken out of his hands. His dragons, quiet and content until now, had discovered the intruder in their den. And they were unpleasant about it. 

**Ho ho, what do we have here?**

_CRUNCH_

Hanzo gasped and went limp, all resistance and control gone. He hung, dangled over the precipice without the will or power to break away. He was no longer in control of his functions. He no longer breathed. He could not feel his heart pounding, his blood pumping. He was no longer a human being, with a body and mind. 

He was a battleground. Two great powers dueled within him, punching holes in his soul, running rampant over his mind, cracking, scabbing, and cracking again the bones of his body. Each hoping to vanquish the other before the ground was too ruined to till. Fit only to be salted and burned. 

The precipice, the red skull, the dead-eyed void inched him down. The dragons, twined and angered, wrenched him up. He fractured between them, helpless. His vision was gone, his tongue frozen in his mouth. His chest would not expand to scream. 

“What the hell is going on?”

Rough, strong pressure grabbed him, hauling him away from the battle. Away from the apex of two great forces combining. Brought him to shelter. 

Hanzo blinked, willing his eyes to remember color, form, and depth. Jesse—his Jesse, with his familiar hat, the recognizable belt buckle, and well-worn flannel, hovered over him. He looked horrified.

“Hanzo?” 

“Yes.” His knees wobbled, threatened to give out and put him in the dirt Jesse’s grip be damned. 

“You’re not here!” Jesse rejected. His grip did not lessen. 

“Yes, I am,” Hanzo snarled, fighting nausea racking his body.

“No, you can’t. This isn’t—you’re not real, I’m so deep I can’t—,”

Hanzo sunk shaking fingers into Jesse’s hair and kissed him, harsh and demanding. Around them, what was left of the desert disintegrated, taking them with it. They vanished, hauled into a place of existence that could no longer support them. 

_"this was unforeseen.”_ The dragons gasped as pressure, a new and indulgent sensation, climbed up their spines to the sensitive joint of their necks.

The Deadeye grinned. The dragons squirmed under a firm hand like the pair of over-eager serpents they were. **"Y’all’re the ones who came tromping into my playground."**

 _"for the sake of one who asked.”_ The dragons were not ashamed of what they had done to arrive in their predicament. They slithered over The Deadeye, growing, stretching, binding. They captured between them one who wandered alone. The horror of such an isolated existence petrified they who ran together, hunted together, thrived together and loved together.

 **"Yeah? Wasn’t mine doing the asking. Brought this on yourselves, youngins.”** Their scales were a splendid display of fetching allure. Rough, smooth, rough, smooth. The alternating sensitivity captivated The Deadeye, who clamped down their necks to still them and study them in luxurious detail.

 _"we acted since you would not.”_ The dragons enjoyed the petting. It allowed them a closer inspection as well; they were not above their curiosity. The Deadeye’s fingers held them with good pressure. Strong, but not painful.

 **You think I’ve been asleep at the wheel? Who killed your wannabe master? Sure as shit wasn’t y'all, all trussed and helpless and waiting for someone to come rescue you.”** The dragons flashed from under the hands of The Deadeye, a volatile volley of emotions rioting under their skin. Didn’t like being reminded of that, huh? The Deadeye didn’t blame ‘em, not really. What a shitty trap to fall into, to be at the mercy of one they did not choose. Or was it something else that made them fidget?

 _"a death as elegant as it was satisfying does not righten the scale of your avarice you thief.”_ The bodies twined around The Deadeye constricted, anger and lust and angry battle-lust igniting at the brazen attempt on what was theirs. Being cut from their host by a dead man was one thing; having The Deadeye make a play for their host was another entirely.

Endearing shocks danced over The Deadeye, bringing to life desires long-dead by necessity. A mite territorial, were these wee dragons. And here The Deadeye had just been playing. Mostly. **"You think I’m greedy? What’re y’all, if not sneaky little hoarders, sniffin’ around what don’t belong to you? You don’t get both of ‘em!"**

 _"neither do you.”_ The dragons understood. They sometimes imagined existence in a metal arm, under a blazing sun in the desert heat. It did not mean they planned to go through with it. That was the epitome of uncouth. Their constricting around The Deadeye lost its playful edge, falling further into agony without the benefit of ecstasy to balance it.

The Deadeye hissed, nerves spasming with unexpected vigor. **"Sheesh. I wasn’t serious! He’s all yours, right as rain.”** Sides, if The Deadeye left well enough alone on that front, better things came along. The intimate sensation of their tug-o-war returned, the dragons modified.

 _"serious enough.”_ The dragons did not pout. They were far too grand for such things.

The Deadeye soothed a hand over scales, moving down each spine with careful consideration. As close to an apology as The Deadeye could ever contemplate. **"What can I say, I like attention. Sure got y’all’s with that little tug, didn’t I?”** To emphasis the point, The Deadeye goosed the dragons at their tails, chucking when they squawked and nipped. Dignity had its day, but this was better.

 _"you already had our attention.”_ The dragons wove themselves in and out so The Deadeye was braided between them.

 **"Now y’all’re just flirting. You think I need you?”** From between the dragons, The Deadeye radiated, stealing power from supernovas to warm scales and gunsmoke alike. The heat plied the crafty little babies, drawn as they were toward comforting touch. Still so young—The Deadeye had so much to teach them.

 _"you are like us.”_ The dragons ate the warmth, turning it into action. The Deadeye, drifting unaccompanied, did not know what was possible with the abilities of another. So alone. The dragons wanted to correct that.

 **"We ain’t alike, pretties.”** Nice as the thought was that The Deadeye shared anything in common with these brilliant little beauties, it just wasn’t true. Presences flexed in binary opposites: a solidification of The Deadeye’s point. For all they shared perception, they were as different as night and day; desert and sky; rage and serenity.

 _"we are as alike as two opposites in harmony.”_ The dragons had decided. It was ever thus. They did not trade in denials. They dug in their claws and wrapped themselves around every stray dimension comprising The Deadeye. They would not let go.

 **"Two of y’all and one of little old me. Who thinks this is fair?”** The Deadeye could take ‘em. But see, that wasn’t the point.

 _"we are one we will always be one we will not abandon what is ours and what is asked of us."_

**"Now see here, I ain’t abandoning no one! I’s just doing what needed doing. You see me interrupting your rituals, your space?"**

_"we were worried."_

**“Still, bad manners, invading like you did. I oughtta take it outta your hides, you misbehaving terrors. What’s the bet the pair of you aren’t just aching to be taken in hand?”** The dragons trembled in under The Deadeye’s touch, and not an ounce of it had to do with dread. Now there was an intriguing thought. Slowly, giving the dragons plenty of time to put a halt to things, The Deadeye nudged forward; and was welcomed into waiting warmth.

 _"nevertheless it would be wise to consider some amicable solution moving forward.”_ The dragons hooked their claws in, urging The Deadeye to a faster pace. They sought their pleasure in turn. The Deadeye breached them; so too did they enter The Deadeye. They wriggled deep, the slip in The Deadeye’s defenses, giving them an advantage. As the Deadeye jerked against them, they wound tighter, nuzzling to distract from their possession. From deep within their chests they rumbled, possessive and content with their newly claimed territory. They lapped at occupied space, reassuring The Deadeye, who heaved in breathless, startled laughter. They knew tricks aplenty of their own.

 **“Mischievous little brats!”** The Deadeye loved them. **"Live in love and harmony? Elsewise, mutually assured destruction?"**

_"indeed but perhaps intimately as well.”_ They did not allow that to be a question, as much as it begged to be one. Being a question meant the dragons may not get their way. And they always got their way.

It was a thought that tantalized nearly as much as the dragons themselves did. The Deadeye had never had company like this before… **“I could see my way to sharing.”** In more than one way. Shifting mind and presence, The Deadeye slipped away from the dragon’s devastating grasp. They gave chase, and let themselves be spun into elegant little knots under sturdy guidance. The Deadeye toyed with the laws of the universe until the dragons were pinned beneath hot, pulsing weight; established a set of binds to which they would find no escape. They bucked, The Deadeye held. They reached for the control of their previous push and pull, The Deadeye sunk more weight onto them. Their hold broken, all the precious youngins could do was writhe and cry as The Deadeye bared into them with slow, deep thrusts. **“That’s it; take it nice and pretty, just like you’ve always wanted, darlings. Behave, come on now. Let me in, and I’ll give you what you need.”**

The dragons screamed as a new, wildly visceral force yielded them open and pliant. The pleasure made them arch and preen under a strict hand and sweet words. The internal, the overwhelming, the combination of age-won dominance and adoring lust gave them precisely what they wanted. What they needed. The Deadeye, over them, in them, around them. Part of them.

 **"Better?”** Smug, with a side of awed delight.

 _"acceptable.”_ The dragons dragged The Deadeye down. They did not let go.

Jesse wrapped a hand around the back of Hanzo’s neck and kissed him, sweet and relieved. 

“Okay, maybe you are here,” he whispered into Hanzo’s mouth, amazed. The desert blossomed cool and welcoming on them. The night air brought out starlight. If he listened, he could pick out the faint crackling of a juniper and sage fire roaring in his cabin. Wait—his cabin? 

“We’re at my cabin,” he said, looking around. He recognized Hellfire Gorge, and in the distance, the mountains Truth and Consequence. 

“Yes,” Hanzo replied, busy working at Jesse’s throat, a hot, heavy set of teeth against his pulse point. 

“Oh good,” Jesse murmured, wrapping himself tightly around Hanzo. “That means there’s a bed we can use.” Sensual energy pulsed through him, sprung from an unknown well and driving him deep into longing for the man in his arms. Hanzo met him inch for inch, hands striving to be everywhere at once. 

They stumbled back into the cabin: through the living room; onto the bed. Their traded kisses were messy, uncoordinated, and frequently off-target. Jesse’s clothes didn’t stand a chance against Hanzo’s persistent, talented fingers. That was alright—he was more interested in the white henley and black linen pants Hanzo sported. “Are these my clothes?” 

“Probably,” Hanzo replied. “They fit well enough. You thought to forgo a belt—good.” Jesse’s jeans popped open. Why hadn’t he put on a belt this morning? And he hadn’t seen this green and gray flannel shirt in years. 

Hanzo’s hand wrapped around him, and Jesse’s sartorial choices promptly no longer mattered. Desire burned all rational thought away. He knew he had been asleep; now, he was awake. Gloriously, wonderfully, brilliantly awake. Hanzo’s enthusiasm was infectious. He matched Jesse, turn for turn, kiss for kiss. It was heady and heartening. With well-earned surety, Jesse stripped Hanzo down to his skin. The band holding his hair in place was last; Jesse took a frankly inordinate about of pleasure snapping the tie across the room. Hanzo’s hair fell around his face and shoulders, and Jesse was lost to all reason. 

Hanzo shoved Jesse into bed, climbed into his lap, and straddled his hips. He gripped Jesse’s chin and angled him correctly for a kiss that languished in depravity. It was no longer possible to tell who was making more noise. Jesse went to work with his worship. Hanzo was hot and ready for him, and it was a work of enjoyment to prepare his body.

“Do you know,” Hanzo growled as he eased Jesse into him. “How much I have missed you?” 

“I’m getting the idea,” Jesse gasped. He relinquished control of their pace without a fight; Hanzo rolled his hips, taking Jesse deep, and shuddered apart. His head fell back; a single line drawn from his cock to his stomach, his chest, the dip of his collarbone, his throat, the bottom of his chin, bewitched Jesse. He trailed his fingers up the path his eyes savored. Hanzo fell forward, confident that Jesse would brace him. And he did, metal hand on his chest and flesh one on his face, framing dark, unblinking eyes. 

“You came for me,” Hanzo said. “In Japan. You came for me." Jesse stilled. Stared. With a great heave of his body, he slung Hanzo into the bed and loomed over him. 

“So did you. I know you’re not here by accident,” he whispered. Hanzo scrambled at his shoulders, felt up his chest, searching for his heartbeat. It was loud and fast in his chest.

“I will always come find you,” Hanzo insisted. His toes curled along Jesse’s thighs at a deep thrust angled just right. “Especially when you do stupid, risky things.” 

“Like save your ass?” Jesse laughed breathless into Hanzo’s neck. The sheer excitement, heavily tainted with joy and awe, kicked any thought of worry or concern from his mind. There was nothing and no one he loved more in this man. Heat, sweat, and panting gasps filled his attention, banishing all else away. The thrust of his body a staccato rhythm, and everything collapsed into a heap of dazed pleasure. Hanzo groaned, guttural. Jesse counted that as a win. He pressed into Hanzo at every opportunity; face, chest, hips, cock, fusing them together at every possible stage of intimacy. He laid a hand on Hanzo, coaxing him along in time. 

“God, Hanzo. Beautiful, absolutely beautiful,” he shot off at the mouth, packing his words with all the devotion he couldn’t name. “Please, sugar, please let me hear you. Missed you so much, I just gotta hear your voice again."

Hanzo sobbed, shook, and fell, screaming the whole way down. He writhed in Jesse’s arms, in his bed, on his cock. Jesse followed, laughing as he came. 

***

They weren’t in the cabin anymore. That much Hanzo’s sleepy, sluggish brain was sure of as he swam through senselessness. He possessed no concern or urgency over their destination; he could hear Jesse’s heartbeat, feel his body heat pressed close. They faded in and out of memories on a path neither of them dictated. 

Gravity bumped Hanzo into unwanted awareness; he cracked his eyes open and focused them into middle-distance. He lay curled across Jesse’s chest. He was comfortable and warm. He was reasonably sure they were naked, but that did not matter. 

If he squinted, he made out enough detail to piece together their environment. The backseat of a truck. Heavy gray skies spat ran, scraping reddish dirt off of the windows. The details of the interior and the driver were beyond his comprehension.

“Who’s driving?” Hanzo asked into Jesse’s skin. 

“My pa. Deadlock bruiser. Reyes. Don’t matter. Back seat’s always the same.”

“Where are we going?” 

Jesse groaned and craned his head around. The backseat accommodated the newly occupied space. “Matters even less. Hungry?” 

“Yes.” It has been ages since the MREs. Two Jesse’s ago. It was as consistent a way to tell time as any, as far as they had come.

There was a box of peaches on the floorboards. Hanzo could see them as clear as day. Jesse reached for one, it fell from whole to sliced in transit. He gave it to Hanzo. The hand moved from his mouth to his shoulder, and fingers skated down his bare arm. 

“Where are the dragons?” Jesse asked. 

“Not here—I believe it has something to do with how they transported me here, though I couldn’t be sure until I speak with them again.” 

“How’d they do that?”

“They consumed me.” 

The fingers stilled, rigid. Hanzo ate another slice of peach while Jesse collected his thoughts. “You let a pair of dragons swallow you?”

“You let yourself slip into a coma to kill my relatives and captors.”

“Not the same thing. At all.”

“It is the same thing; stop arguing with me. What do we go next?”

“I don’t rightly know.”

“Dr. Ziegler said you did this once before—shot the Deadeye without a weapon. But you couldn’t replicate it while in Blackwatch.”

“Shooting the Deadeye blind—that’s what it’s called. I only ever did it once before, and I didn’t even realize that’s what it was until it was too late. Never wanted to do it again, so I told Reyes it was a fluke. I didn’t want him having that power. I couldn’t imagine what he would have sent me into with that kinda knowledge in his back pocket.”

Having encountered Jesse’s version of Reyes, Hanzo bitterly agreed with his assessment. “Did you come here, then? This place of…” he still did not know what to call this place. ‘Subconsciousness' struck him as inadequate. 

“It was different. I was seventeen.” 

“And stupid?” 

“So stupid. I don’t think I even made it out of the bar back then. Eventually, I just…faded back into reality. Don’t know how.”

“Did the bar have a name?”

“It probably did. Don’t remember it, though. Haven’t been there since I was ten. Add to that two decades of pile-on…more baggage to work through. More tarpits to fall into. I don’t know where the exit would be, let alone how to get there.” 

“Alright. So we follow the sun.”

“Really?”

“It’s what led me to you in the first place.”

“And when the sun goes down?”

“Then we follow the moon. It’s been full every night we’ve been here.”

Jesse peered up through the dirty windows. “That’s weird.”

Hanzo couldn’t word a reply that so drily summed up his disbelief at Jesse’s skewed perspective as his silence did, so he that speak for itself. He pressed his face back into Jesse’s neck and drifted. The nervous fingers tapping at the space between his shoulder blades kept him from falling into blissful sleep. 

“What?” he grumbled to stop Jesse relentlessness.

“What if we don’t make it?”

“Then we do it all again. Only this time, I am wearing the Susie Luca shirt.” 

***

 _"we are contented.”_ The dragons sprawled carelessly, sore and stretched and well-used. Smoke curled from their mouths, creating constellations. They twined their bodies, lovingly smothering one another in a manner long since habit. They left just enough space for their prey. Blown to smithereens by their coalescence and scattered through dimensions, The Deadeye needed to be collected and embedded within them while too lethargic to fight back.

 **"Told you I’d give you what you needed, little monsters mine.”** Sated was a good look for the dragons, if The Deadeye was to have a say. They flopped over The Deadeye, rubbing themselves in intimate spaces. They felt divine. **“Keep doing that, and I may never let y’all leave."**

 _"You are too cocky.”_ Through persistent squirming, they tucked The Deadeye in between their scales, locking into place. 

Adorably stubborn little nightmares, these two were. The Deadeye was elated, and only a little exhausted. Was this what it was like to exist with another? Dredging strength from the depths, The Deadeye rebounded energy into the dragons and back, lacing it with a beautiful bite to make them squirm. They flailed against the fresh ravishment, the waves of intensity reducing them to little more than overstimulated nerves. The Deadeye held them in place through it, feeding off their mewling with unholy delight. **“Don’t think y’all'll trap me that easily. Don’t forget who’s sandbox you’re in.”**

_"gloating is unseemly and you are unfair.”_

The Deadeye eased up, petting the dragons with soothing starlight heat. The urging relaxed them wonderfully. **“Alright, darlings. We’ll level the playing field. Meet me in the green world?"**

_That would please us greatly._

***

Jesse woke to a world of light and sound. Everything hurt; his lungs, his skull, his arms his _eyes_. Sensor alarms screeched in his ears. His bones felt like twisted rubber and resisted any order to move. Disgusting fuzz coated his tongue and teeth, adding to the pile of his abrupt discomfort. 

Hands were on him; Jesse traced them upward to Fareeha. She stood over him, holding him down when he thrashed. He was thrilled enough to see her face and hear her voice that he didn't fight her. Much. 

"Easy, easy!" she ordered, keeping him on his back. "Don't be stupid. You've used up all the stupid you're allowed this year. Just lay there, and breath, yeah? Angela's on her way." 

Jesse groaned and grasped for words. "Fuck me," was the most he could manage for a start.

"Maybe later," Fareeha replied by rout. She was too distracted by his read-outs to give the joke her full attention. 

"How long was I out?" 

"Five days, give or take a couple hours. You're a feckless jackass for worrying me." 

"Sorry about that. Do me a favor and shut the damn sensors off, would you?" 

"Here," came Angela's voice. The alarms cut, leaving his ears ringing. Blonde hair interrupted his line of sight to the ceiling. "How are you feeling?" 

"Like shit," Jesse said. "But getting better." Fareeha pet his hair back; it was lovely. He bumped her knuckles with his forehead. "Didn't expect to see you here."

Fareeha twerked his ear, a small, relieved smile on her lips. "Got here as quick as I could. Glad to see you awake." 

"Yeah, that's nice. Where's Hanzo?" 

"If the way Genji flew out of here a minute ago is any indication, he'll be around shortly," Angela said. "I have plenty of words for you, Jesse McCree."

Jesse had a feeling he was in for a lot of yelling from multiple people in the coming days. God, his head hurt. 

Crashing came from the entrance of medbay, followed by a string of angry Japanese in two tenors. 

"Angela!" Genji called. "I need some help here!" 

Jesse tried to get up: Fareeha shoved him right back down. "I'll keep him in place," she assured Angela, already off to deal with her new and temperamental patient. More angry Japanese heralded her arrival on the scene. Fareeha raised her eyebrows at some of the more choice phrases that filtered down the hall. 

He didn't need to see what was going on: that Hanzo sounded upset was enough to set Jesse's body moving. He tried to get up again; Fareeha's grip on his shoulders was just shy of painful as she cut him off. "He's fine," she said. "Angela and Genji'll make sure of it. Stop thinking you gotta solve everything." Jesse reached up with uncoordinated fingers, clumsily reassuring her. And loosening her grasp, just a little bit. Only enough to breath. 

"When'd you get here?" he asked, looking for a distraction.

"Yesterday morning. I told you to wait for me." 

"Sorry." He kinda was. The chaos in Japan would have turned out differently had he not been horrendously determined to get to Hanzo as quickly as he could and at any cost. Try as he might, he didn't regret his actions. For as much hell as he caused, he had neutralized the threat. The Arakawas would never come for Hanzo again. 

"You already apologized," Fareeha told him. She didn't sound particularly gracious and appeased, but at least she wasn't brushing his shoulder anymore. Her thumb made small, comforting circles into the joint of his collarbone. "Just know I'll be cashing this stupidity in the next time you decide to lecture me on my life choices."

Jesse laughed. It turned into a groan as it shook his ribs. "Oh, that hurt." 

"Then stop laughing. Just tell me one thing," Fareeha said. Her eyes were a mix of concern and curiosity. "Is he worth this?" 

"Yes," Jesse replied, unashamed and enchanted. He had known Hanzo had been worth his soul and sanity months ago. Around the time Hanzo swiped his Susie Luca shirt without so much as a fight from Jesse. That had never been in question; if anything, the Deadeye experience left Jesse vindicated in his decision. He would have made it out of the desert on his own, given time. It would have been a bloodthirsty slog through the bitter, nasty pits of his memories, but he would have done it. He had done it before. But there was a reason he never, _never_ shot The Deadeye blind. It demanded so much in return, and Jesse couldn't make the pilgrimage every time he thought he was in a tight spot. Hanzo's arrival, his protection, and his guidance meant Jesse didn't arrive back to his body worse for wear. 

Weeks from now, once emotions settled and logic reigned, his old instincts would rise up and slap him silly. No plan, no recon, he had arrived at an unknown situation in Japan with nothing but threats on his tongue and his thumb on the nuclear option. What kind of covert agent was he? 

He wasn't a covert agent, not anymore. He was a cowboy who was head over heels for a stubbornly beautiful yakuza scion with a past. His only saving grace was that said scion had a thing for nameless bandits with questionable life choices. 

There was a rush of noise and action outside Jesse's room. 

"Hanzo, really—," 

"Anija!" 

Hanzo stumbled into Jesse's room. He was drenched in sweat, with dirt in his face and grass in his hair, and his clothes askew. He looked wild and breath-taking. No blood. No visible injuries. He was stunning to Jesse, who couldn't stop grinning at the sight of him. 

"Hey, darlin'," 

"You idiot," Hanzo hissed, stalking forward. He likely would have climbed into Jesse's bed and strangled him had Angela not headed him off at the pass. She maneuvered Hanzo into a nearby chair, slapping sensors on his skin and inspecting his pupils around his snarling. When he tried to push her away, Genji shoved him right back. Between the two of them, Hanzo could do nothing but accept the inspection. His eyes stayed on Jesse. 

Fareeha and Genji stayed around long enough to ensure Jesse and Hanzo remained outnumbered while Angela went over them with a fine-tooth comb. Jesse did his best to answer her questions, knowing full-well a debriefing report was in his immediate future. Hanzo kept himself sullenly silent through the proceedings, answering only when Genji harangued him.

When they were finally left alone, the sun was down, and they were exhausted. Angela left them with orders to rest. The moment her back was turned, Hanzo skipped out of his bed and into Jesse's, who welcomed him with open arms.

"Fucking moron," Hanzo mumbled into his neck. He was running on empty, and his body was rapidly cashing all the bad checks he had written it in the last week. 

"Same to you, darlin'. No more trips to your homeland for a while, yeah?" 

"Agreed." 

A full moon rose in the window. 

"How much of it do you remember?" Jesse mumbled to the ceiling. 

"Every moment," Hanzo confirmed, quiet and dreadful. "You?"

"More than I want to." There were definitely going to be some things left out of the debrief report. Jesse would figure all that out tomorrow.

Angela had agreed to silence their monitors if Hanzo agreed to keep his sensors attached. It made for a quiet room, and his heartbeat thumped in his ears. On his shoulder, Hanzo grumbled, shifted, and huffed a light snore into his chest hair. When was the last time he had gotten a full night's sleep? Slowly, inevitably, Jesse followed him, letting his consciousness slip off into blessed rest. 

"Good to see you made it to the green world," Hanzo whispered. 

"Thanks, darlings. The sandbox can get mighty lonely sometimes," Jesse replied. 

***

Jesse had not been to his cabin in years. It was a lonely place, built to be a final refuge if ever Jesse needed it. An untraceable escape. 

It took on a different light, with someone to share it with. It didn't seem so suffocating or isolating. Hanzo loved the cabin, from the comprehensive view to the juniper copse to the buffalo-fur rug. Especially the buffalo-fur rug. Jesse was discovering just how much in intimate detail. 

He had been losing clothes to Hanzo's persistent hands all morning; his belt first, gone before he even noticed; his shirt unbuttoned and tossed aside while he did the breakfast dishes; his socks stolen along with his cigarillo on the porch; A cup of coffee in exchange for his pants. By the time he surrendered his underwear, Hanzo had him on his back on the living room floor. The juniper and sage fire snapped and cracked, spreading heat over his bare skin; thick fur counteracted with goosebumps. Caught in a deliciously torturous feedback loop, Jesse had no defenses left against Hanzo, who nipped at his shoulder, explored his torso, eased his thighs apart. 

Jesse let Hanzo have his way since it made him happy. It was one of those things they had learned about one another over time. 

"How long you been thinking about this?" Jesse asked, relaxing into the pressure of Hanzo's fingers. 

"Long enough," Hanzo admitted. 

The deliberate intention on his face had Jesse laughing and urging him close, kissing his forehead, his nose, his cheek. When Hanzo eased into him, he shoved his gasp behind Hanzo's teeth. Bringing his knees up and spreading his thighs wider, he rocking in time with Hanzo, trading noises back and forth. 

"Sad we didn't get a chance to do this sooner?" he panted. 

"No. I think this was a perfect time," Hanzo disagreed, pressing their foreheads together. "For once, it is a perfect time." Heart tight and thoughts gone fuzzy, Jesse reached up and pulled his hair tie out, letting his inky hair down his shoulders. He shot the tie across the room, hopefully, to not be seen for the rest of the day. 

"God, if only you knew how crazy you make me," he whimpered when Hanzo plundered deeper. Soft laughter warmed the delicate skin under his ear; whiskers brushed it with a kiss. 

"I could say the same to you. Only you really do not know." 

Jesse lost his words before he could reply; hot, tenacious pleasure overtook him, ripping his senses clean away from reason and shaking him from toes to teeth. His world collapsed into an aperture of the man above him; the rhythm they created together. The man who marveled at him like Jesse was…was worth being marveled at. How mind-blowing. Clutching Hanzo close, he came; determined, he bore down and brought Hanzo along with him. 

Hanzo was too polite and well-trained to collapse on him—he instead eased down, perfectly content to settle into Jesse in every way possible. Moving seemed to barbarous to contemplate. Jesse splayed back as he fought to regain his breath, thinking of dragons and deserts. 

"I do know," he whispered when his heartbeat returned to a reasonable beat. 

"Hmm?" Hanzo was always a little loopy in his afterglow. Jesse thought it was adorable. He flipped a lock of black hair over his knuckles. 

"I do know how crazy I make you. It's just…" 

"Unbelievable someone could care enough to risk their own life and limb for your safety," Hanzo's tone made it clear he wasn't reading Jesse's thoughts so much as expressing his own. 

"And could wring from me such calamity." 

Hanzo nipped his shoulder. "Do not think you can slip Susie Luca lyrics past me."

Jesse laughed, loud and thrilled. Hanzo patiently waited until he was breathless to kiss him silly. 

The dragons interlocked their scales around a red-tainted, skeletal existence; The Deadeye laid a steady hand upon them and rubbed soothing circles into the joint of their necks. Contentment was a new feeling all around. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the location of Jesse's cabin is completely made up and has not geological counterpoint. I was making up names as I went along. I think i glanced side-ways at a map of New Mexico for half a second. 
> 
> Thank you again, everyone. I'm glad you joined me on this roller-coaster. I hope you had fun.
> 
> <3


End file.
